Family desperate for answers eight years after disappearance of Florida teen, Sophie Reeder

NBC News
Kyani Reid
March 18, 2025

“I don’t want Sophie to be forgotten about,” Kirsten Milhorn told Dateline. “It’s just not acceptable.”

Kirsten’s niece, Sophie Reeder, has been missing for eight years. The then 15-year-old vanished on May 19, 2017, in Fort Lauderdale.

For Sophie’s family, it’s been a battle to find answers. “It’s frustrating. It’s super frustrating,” Kirsten said.

Sophie grew up in Fort Lauderdale. Kirsten, Sophie’s paternal aunt, told Dateline their whole family is from there. “We have a huge family,” she said. “So she was loved and cared for and everything.”

Kirsten describes her niece as creative. “Caring, thoughtful, funny—definitely loves art,” she said. “Loves painting and loves doing crafts.”

At the time of her disappearance, Sophie lived with her father, Patrick Reeder, but often visited her mother, Nicole Easely-Twist.

Patrick told Dateline that as a child, Sophie was bossy and outgoing but things got challenging as she grew into a teenager. “She became a little reclusive,” he said.

He says Sophie got in with the wrong crowd and began to have troubles in school, leading him to put her in online classes. “But that was only for six months. And then she went missing,” he said.

According to Patrick, Friday, May 19, 2017, started out like any normal day. “And then around 11 o’clock p.m., she started pacing up and down the hall up and down the house, you know, on her phone. And I told her to go to bed around 11:30 p.m.,” he recalled.

Patrick says he went to his daughter’s bedroom the next morning, to check on her. But Sophie wasn’t there. “I texted her. I go, ‘Where are you? What’s going on?’ She never replied back,” he said.

He says he then contacted Sophie’s mother, to see if she had gone there. “She’d take the bus out to her mom’s house so I thought, maybe she’s with her mom,” he recalled.

But Sophie wasn’t there.

Then he called his father, who also lived in Fort Lauderdale at the time. “He goes, ‘File a missing persons report,’” Patrick remembered.

Patrick told Dateline he thought he had to wait 48 hours to report his daughter missing, so on May 22, he did just that. “I went Monday morning and I filed it. The lady’s like, ‘Teenaged girl? She’ll be back in a week,’” he said someone at the Fort Lauderdale Police Department told him when they took the report. He hoped they were right.

But a week went by, no Sophie.

Dateline spoke with Sergeant Don Geiger of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. He says surveillance footage captured Sophie walking past her house around 11 p.m. on May 19. She was captured again around 2 a.m., walking along the Davie Boulevard corridor, not far from her home. “She left her home in the overnight hours and never returned,” Geiger said

The video shows Sophie wearing a brown fur coat, a black dress, red Converse sneakers, and white headphones.

Sergeant Geiger says Sophie’s phone was last pinged to the 1700 block of SW 11th Court in Fort Lauderdale.

He says that since Sophie’s disappearance, the search efforts have been extensive. “We checked the canals behind her house. We’ve brought in cadaver dogs to search the area where her phone was last pinged at. We’ve also worked with our federal counterparts,” Geiger explained.

Detectives also searched Sophie’s home. Geiger says several items were left behind that would indicate Sophie planned to return home. “She left the candle burning. There was still money left in her room,” he said. “There was no indication that she packed up and left and didn’t want to return home.”

According to Sophie’s aunt, Kirsten Milhorn, the family did their own digging. “My nephew had hacked into her computer and saw that she was looking at ‘sugar daddy’ sites,” she said. “So, in my mind, that all points to the trafficker.”

Sergeant Geiger told Dateline officers also looked into Sophie’s laptop and the ‘sugar daddy’ sites. “She did sign up for several of those sites but no posts were ever made, no messages ever received,” he said. “It looked like it was in the initial stages of her maybe signing up for that but she never made any efforts to put herself out there.”

Kirsten says phone records show that prior to Sophie’s disappearance, she may have been talking to someone. “There was a phone call around 5 a.m. shortly after Sophie went missing. Then her phone cut off at 9 a.m.,” she said.

Sergeant Geiger confirmed Sophie’s phone records were looked into, and that she was in communication with several people. “One of the individuals we believe she was buying marijuana from,” Sgt. Geiger said. “There was also an individual that had some ties to human trafficking or things with minors.”

Geiger says they’ve found nothing to indicate Sophie was trafficked. “We’ve obviously worked extensively looking into all the possibilities of human trafficking,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s a trafficking situation at all.”

However, he does believe Sophie has met with foul play. “We’ve interviewed several individuals pertaining to Sophie’s disappearance but none of them have led to anyone being considered a suspect,” he said.

Patrick Reeder told Dateline he doesn’t know what happened to his daughter, but says he doesn’t want to believe she was trafficked. “In my heart, I just don’t wanna believe that,” he said.

He’s just hoping Sophie’s still out there. “Her room’s still the same,” he said. “I’ll always be there for her, no matter what.”

Kirsten Milhorn says she took the lead for the family on her niece’s case about three years ago. “I was out of work for six weeks, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m [going to] check on the case,’” she recalled. “I just assumed that when someone goes missing, everything goes into finding them.”

Kirsten told Dateline she was surprised at the lack of attention her niece’s case had gotten. “It’s not just about Sophie. It’s about all the girls behind Sophie. It’s about all the little girls right now that are 15 and lack self-esteem,” she said. “There’s so many pieces of it. I feel like the system failed her.”

When Dateline spoke to Kirsten, she said she and Patrick had just come from speaking with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. “I literally just left the city commissioner’s office, and the chief of police was there, along with the city manager,” she said. “The new chief kind of assured me that the communication will get better moving forward.”

Casey Liening is the spokesperson for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. She told Dateline the department is doing everything it can to help solve Sophie’s case. “This is one of those cases that a lot of us take home at night because we don’t really have the answers that we really want as to what happened to Sophie Reeder,” she said. “We appreciate any assistance.”

Kirsten lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a public school teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. She tries to teach her students about the dangers of talking to people online. “Half of the kids chat with people they don’t even know,” she said. “We need to educate parents, we need to educate the kids, and we need to communicate.”

In a follow-up text to Dateline, Kirsten said she also wants to educate people on the realities of human trafficking. “I want missing kids, no matter the color or race, to be treated as urgent,” she wrote.

Being a teacher isn’t Kirsten’s only job now—she’s also dedicated to finding her niece. “I just want to know where she is,” she said. “Don’t quit on Sophie.”

Sophie was 5’1” and weighed 100 lbs. at the time of her disappearance, with brown curly hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a brown coat, a black dress, red Converse sneakers, and white headphones.

She would be 23 years old today.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department is offering a reward of up to $25,000 for credible information that leads to the recovery of Sophie Reeder.

Anyone with information about Sophie’s disappearance is asked to call the Fort Lauderdale Police Department at 954-828-6677 or email sophietips@flpd.gov.

Photo credit: NBC News