There are gaps in the story of why 21-year-old Lanessa Roosa has had no contact with her family since Jan. 1. But one thing is certain — Roosa’s mother is desperate to hear from her.
Greenfield area resident Angela Jordan, Roosa’s mother, says law enforcement is not trying hard enough to find her, and will not file a missing person report. But Highland County Sheriff Donnie Barrera said his office is looking for her, and has followed up on several leads, but as of Thursday afternoon those leads had not been fruitful.
“As a mother, I am hurt and disappointed that the people that are hired to protect and serve us as a community have let me and my family down,” Jordan said in a Facebook message. “I am devastated that my daughter has been missing for two and half weeks, and I feel as if law enforcement has been no help in looking for or locating her. At this point, my major concern is to know and have proof that she is still living, as they seem to think, but they can not provide me with proof. Once they can comb the entire woods she ran into and know for sure she is not out there, then maybe I can stop losing sleep every night and not cry every day. No parent deserves to go through the heartache that her father and I, and her step-parents, are going through. We deserve answers and help. So, I beg the public to please come forward with any information they may have leading to her whereabouts. She needs help, is all we know, and won’t stop until she gets it.”
But Barrera said not all of Jordan’s claims are accurate.
The sheriff said that at 5:15 p.m. on Jan. 1, his office received a call of criminal damaging at the Greystone Motel on U.S. Route 50 just east of the Hillsboro city limits. He said an officer arrived on the scene at 5:26 p.m., and after investigating, determined that Roosa had been crawling through the ductwork above motel rooms, fell through the ceiling, refused help from a man in the room she fell into, then took off into the woods near the motel.
According to Barrera, the officer looked around the area for Roosa and talked to witnesses before clearing the scene at 5:42 p.m.
“No one had any direction of her heading into the woods,” Barrera said. “We’ve been actively searching for her since, and we have followed up on any leads we received, but so far nothing has come through.”
Barrera said that after clearing the scene, the investigating officer spent about 30 minutes driving around the area and asking local residents if they had seen a girl wearing a green shirt and blue leggings, but no one reported seeing her.
Jordan claims that her daughter may have been hurt when she fell through the ceiling and landed on a sink.
But Barrera said the person who first reported to the sheriff’s office what happened at the motel was the man whose room Roosa fell into. Barrera said the man did not notice any injuries.
“He said she ran up through the woods like nothing was wrong with her,” Barrera said.
It is a story with several twists and turns. The series of events apparently began in Greenfield, after police officers there picked Roosa up on a warrant on Dec. 31 and took her to jail.
According to Jordan, her daughter, the mother of a 2-year-old, was wanted on a misdemeanor warrant from Greenfield and a felony warrant from Hillsboro.
Greenfield Police Chief Jeremiah Oyer did not return calls this week seeking comment on the incident.
But Jordan says that Roosa was taken into custody in Greenfield on New Year’s Eve.
“… I assisted in finding her that day,” Roosa said. “After attempting to locate her for three weeks, we finally got a good lead and the bondsman had to contact Greenfield Police Department to help apprehend her… She called me that evening after she was arrested and informed me of how sick she was from a bad infection in her mouth from a tooth and with a staff [sic] infection that was under her arm. She begged me to let her dad bring her daughter in to visit her the next day. Her dad picked up her daughter around 1:50 p.m., went to Greenfield Police Department to visit, and got informed that she was missing.”
After receiving a call from Roosa’s father, Jordan said she drove to the GPD and was told that early on the morning of Jan. 1, her daughter was in severe pain, the police department called a squad to check her out, and the squad determined she needed to go to Adena Greenfield Medical Center.
According to the Jordan, her daughter was granted some kind of 24-hour medical furlough, then after a couple hours at the hospital, Roosa walked out with her boyfriend.
Roosa asked her boyfriend to take her Highland District Hospital in Hillsboro, Jordan said, but on the way there she asked to go to the Greystone first to rest and clean up.
After the boyfriend dropped Roosa off, Jordan said he left to repair problems with his vehicle.
Around 5 p.m. that evening, Jordan said she received a phone call from the boyfriend saying Roosa had crawled into a cubbyhole at the motel. She said she was about 15 minutes from Hillsboro when she received the call.
“Before I got there she had crawled into the ceiling and over top of three or four other motel rooms before she fell through the ceiling into another room and hit her head and hip on the bathroom sink when she fell,” Jordan said.
The next day, Jordan said she, Roosa’s boyfriend, her dad and stepmother searched the woods around the hotel for about four hours, but did not find her.
“It has now been two weeks since this happened. She still has had no contact with anyone. We have had it plastered all over Facebook like we did before, and she came forward on there, because she didn’t want her name out and said she was fine,” Jordan said. “But this time she has not, and my original post had over 1,000 shares, so she should have seen it. She should have replied or commented because it makes her mad, but she has not. She had no money and no clothes with her…”
According to information posted on Facebook, Roosa is 5’3, 115 pounds, white, with a thin build and brown hair. She has a tattoo of a pot leaf on her lower back, a butterfly tattoo on her upper right thigh, and a green and brown camouflage tattoo on her forearm.
Jordan said Roosa has not contacted her, her boyfriend — who Jordan said was her meal ticket — or her best friend from her days at McClain High School. She said that is not like her daughter.
Barrera said his office wants to find Roosa, she has warrants out for her arrest, and that it is not for a lack of effort that they haven’t located her.
“(If someone out there knows anything about her), please, please report it — to the sheriff’s office, the Greenfield Police Department, or just anything anonymously,” Jordan said. “We don’t care who the information comes from. We just want to know where she is. She has a 2-year-old daughter that asks about her every day.”
Reach Jeff Gilliland at 937-402-2522.
