“Every morning when you wake up, it’s the same. Like, here goes another day of not knowing,” Sara Carmichael told Dateline. “What kind of phone call am I going to get today? Am I going to get good news? Am I going to get bad news?”
Sara’s daughter, 25-year-old Marissa Carmichael, has been missing since January 14, 2024.
“It’s very hard not having her,” Marissa’s sister, Emma Villegas, told Dateline. “It’s just a hole in your heart and nothing will help it. Nothing will.”
The last time Marissa’s family saw her, it was around 8:30 p.m. on January 13, and she was getting ready to go out.
“I was asleep on the couch and she laid down on the couch with me,” Sara remembered. “She was supposed to go to work that night. And I woke up briefly and I said, ‘Well, you’re not dressed for work — and it’s a little early.’” Marissa told her mother she had plans before starting her shift at Waffle House. “She said, ‘I’m going to go to the Mexican restaurant across the street and get a drink before work,’” Sara said.
Turns out, Marissa had called out of work earlier that day and made plans to go to a club with a friend instead.
She told her sister Emma about her plans — but did not tell her mother. “I asked her, ‘Are you sure you wanna go out? Don’t you have work?’ But she was like, ‘Well, it’s fine,’” Emma recalled. “She had said, ‘Don’t tell Mom because I don’t want her to worry about me.’”
Marissa left the High Point, North Carolina, home she and her five children shared with her mother and sister around 9 p.m. She never came home.
According to the family, a cousin drove Marissa and her friend to a club called One17 SofaBar & Lounge at 117 N Greene St. in Greensboro, North Carolina — about a 30-minute drive from home. The cousin dropped them off and left.
Marissa’s mother and sister say they reviewed her Facebook messages from that night, and believe Marissa left the club around 2 a.m. with a male acquaintance who met her at the club around that time. They believe the pair went to an Airbnb less than two miles away.
At 3:40 a.m., Marissa called 911 from the Exxon at 801 E. Market St. in Greensboro saying she had been robbed.
“I don’t know where I am in Greensboro,” Marissa said in the 911 call obtained by Dateline. “I just got all my stuff threw out the car. He took off with my phone. I have no clue where I’m at.”
Marissa did not name the person who robbed her in the call.
“When Guilford Metro dispatched police at 4:19 a.m. to check on Ms. Carmichael’s welfare, an officer arrived at 4:21 a.m. and discovered she had left the immediate area,” Annette Ayres, the Greensboro Police Department PIO, told Dateline in an email. “In surveillance footage obtained by police, Ms. Carmichael was seen getting into a vehicle and leaving the gas station.”
The footage is not being publicly released by the Greensboro Police Department. Ayres told Dateline “detectives have identified and interviewed the driver of that vehicle, who is currently considered a witness in this case.”
Sara reported her daughter missing later that day — January 14 — after she woke up and Marissa was not home. “I instantly had a bad feeling,” she said. “She would never let us go worrying or wondering where she was at for longer than a few hours.”
Searches for Marissa began shortly afterward. “Our detectives have conducted more than a dozen interviews to date, obtained surveillance footage from Ms. Carmichael’s last known location and explored numerous leads that resulted in area searches,” Greensboro PD shared in a February 2024 Facebook post. “We also are using technology and other resources to help identify any additional leads.”
Ayres told Dateline that Marissa “not being home with her children — and not having any contact with her family — is out of character for her.” Over the past 14 months, Marissa’s friends and family have searched for her relentlessly. “We have looked in creeks, around lakes and rivers, abandoned houses, boarding houses, motels — several motels — wooded areas, abandoned buildings,” Sara recounted. “I mean, we’ve — we’ve went all over High Point, Greensboro, Archdale. We’ve covered a lot of [ground], but we’re just missing something.”
Sara has done her own sleuthing, as well. “I was at the Airbnb, going through the dumpsters looking all around the property,” she said. “I was at the Exxon. I was knocking on neighbors’ doors asking them if they had the camera on their bell, passing out flyers. I hit the ground.”
One of the hardest challenges for Sara has been explaining to her five grandchildren — ages 5 to 10 — why their mother isn’t home. “With the youngest ones, we just say that she’s lost and we’re looking for her,” she said. “The older ones — they’ve gotten on the internet and they’ve seen people’s opinions. They’ve seen people saying that she’s gone.”
Whether they can understand it or not, however, Sara says it’s an impossible thing to explain regardless.
“I don’t know what to say to them. I just tell them I’m looking and, ‘Nana’s working on a lot of projects — and I’m not giving up and I have a lot of people looking for Mommy,’” she said. “I think they kind of understand that she could, maybe, not be coming back, but they haven’t grasped it. They still think we can find Mommy and get her home.”
Marissa’s kids have moved in with their father, who her family says has been an active part of the searches. “He’s been real strong through it,” Sara said. “But I’ve seen him in a lot of pain from missing Marissa.”
Since her sister vanished, Emma Villegas has given birth to her first child, a girl. “It was really hard for me — pregnant, without her,” Emma said. “I wasn’t there to ask her questions or be like, ‘What’s this?’ Or, ‘Is this normal?’ And she wasn’t there for the delivery. And that really killed me, too.”
Marissa’s family just wants to bring her home. They told Dateline her life was just beginning. “She was going to finally get her own house,” Sara said. “She had big plans.”
The Greensboro Police Department says Marissa’s case remains an active investigation and they encourage anyone with information about her disappearance to come forward.
Marissa is 5’4” and 260 lbs. She has brown eyes and black hair. She has a tattoo of a heart on her face and a butterfly tattoo near her eye. She was last seen wearing a white Tweety Bird T-shirt, blue jeans, and yellow sneakers. She would be 26 years old today.
If you have information, please call the Greensboro Police Department at 336-373-2222. You can also contact Greensboro/Guilford Crime Stoppers to share tips anonymously at 336-373-1000. You can also download the mobile P3tips app for Apple or Android phones to submit a mobile tip, or go to P3tips.com to submit a tip. All tips to Crime Stoppers are anonymous.
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