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‘Amazing’ Ohio High School Senior Mysteriously Vanished Hours Before Graduation
“I’ll never give up searching for her,” Madison Noel Bell’s mother said on social media.
An Ohio teenager, who supposedly left home for a tanning appointment Sunday morning, hasn’t been heard from since.
Madison Noel Bell’s car was found in a church parking lot across the street from the tanning salon on May 17, her family told Cincinnati radio station WKRC. She vanished hours ahead of her high school graduation, family said.
Detectives reportedly found her keys still in the ignition. Her phone was also recovered. The car’s doors were also unlocked, according to relatives.
“I’ve shed a lot of tears, and sometimes I haven’t shed any because I feel like I’ve just cried everything I have out," Melissa Bell, the teen’s mother, told WKRC.
Hundreds, many of them friends of the family, have since joined the search for the missing teenager.
“It makes me feel so much better because that’s my baby,” Melissa said.
Melissa then made a plea to her daughter's potential captor.
“Whoever has her, bring her home to her family," she said, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. "This is not right. You don’t take her and not bring her home. She needs to be back home where she’s safe.”
Authorities have expanded their search efforts into several counties. Investigators suspect Madison could also be traveling in a white four-door Nissan sedan with California license plates.
“We have crews that are distributing flyers,” Andrew Surritt, chief of Rescue 101 Search and Rescue, told WKRC. “We’ve had most of Highland County, Fayette County and Ross County, and we’re starting to work in Pickaway County this evening, and we’ve even sent flyers as far south as Portsmouth, Ohio."
However, search efforts so far have yielded few clues for law enforcement.
Madison's disappearance has since rocked Greenfield, Ohio, a small city of approximately 4,500 people, which is sandwiched in between Cincinnati and Columbus.
“I’ve got a daughter,” Jade Bentley, a search volunteer, told the radio station. “If she was missing, I would want anybody and everybody out here looking.”
The missing teen’s friends described Madison as an “amazing” person and a “good girl.”
“She doesn’t deserve anything like this at all,” Brianna Blair, her classmate, told WKRC. “And I hate that’s she’s going through it, and she’s alone, so I’m hoping we find her soon so that she doesn’t haven’t to be out there by herself anymore."
The search for Madison continued on Tuesday. Law enforcement said she was last seen wearing brown sandals, black leggings, and a black North Face jacket. Madison is Caucasian, has brown hair, and brown eyes. She weighs approximately 125 pounds and is 5'7". The 18-year-old might have also been wearing Star Wars pants, according to authorities. She could also be wearing blue or gray contacts.
In a heartfelt Facebook post on Tuesday, Madison's mother said she has gone days without sleep.
“I can’t rest my mind until Maddie is home safe,” she wrote. “I’ll never give up searching for her.”
Oxygen.com was unable to immediately reach the family for comment on Tuesday.
Anyone with information related to Bell’s disappearance is urged to call the Greenfield Police Department at 937-987-4466 or the Highland County Sheriff’s Office at 937-393-1421.
