The disappearance of Washington state teenager Esmerelda “Kit” Mora raises more questions than answers.
And among those many questions are two that Kit’s older sister, Charlotte Reckard, keeps asking.
“I want to know what the hell happened,” Charlotte told Dateline. “I want to know where Kit is.”
WHO IS KIT MORA?
“You could never be mad at Kit,” Charlotte said. “They’re very smiley, very happy.”
The 16-year-old is creative and loves art. “Art was one of their main hobbies. Other hobbies were writing, reading. They really liked ‘How To Train Your Dragon,’” Charlotte said. “Super into dragons.”
Kit’s best friend, Amythist McCart, told Dateline the same thing. “That was something that Kit held so close to their heart. And the last time that I watched any of those movies was with Kit,” she said. “The new one is coming out and it’s really emotional because they’re not going to see it, you know, and we’re not going to go make a day of it and go watch it on opening day. Like, that’s just not a thing anymore.”
“I never knew anyone like Kit,” Amythist said. They met on the first day of kindergarten. “Kit didn’t have a mean bone in their body.”
But Kit did have some battles. “They struggled with mental health, but I think most teenagers do,” Charlotte said. “A lot of the mental health struggles that Kit had, I had experienced similar, so we were very close in that aspect. We kind of just knew that we could lean on each other.”
Amythist told Dateline that Kit shared those struggles with her. “A very seldom few knew what Kit was actually struggling with,” she said. Amythist says Kit is asexual, aromantic, and struggles with physical touch and body dysmorphia.
Charlotte described Kit as anxious, someone who didn’t like leaving the house or interacting with people they didn’t know. “Kit wasn’t the type to go out and hang out with a bunch of people all at once,” she said.
Charlotte had been adopted as a toddler by Bonnie and Charlie Groo -- Kit’s great-grandparents on their father’s side. A few years later, Kit joined them at their home in Yakima. “We had been trying to get Kit in our care for a couple of years,” Bonnie said. “We got temporary custody, and then we were granted third-party custody,” Charlotte explained.
Kit and Charlie had a very close relationship. “[Kit] was so easy to get along with, we never had a problem,” Charlie said. “Other than, as usual, keeping your bedroom clean.”
Best friend Amythist remembers Kit describing their early childhood as complicated, but things got better once they moved to Yakima. “Once that happened, they were loved and taken care of,” she said.
As Kit grew up, they started exploring their Indigenous heritage. Kit “loved learning new things about different tribes and different traditions,” Charlotte said.
Kit also identifies as non-binary. “Kit didn’t directly come out to a lot of people. They kind of kept it amongst friends,” Charlotte said. “We kind of knew something was a little bit different with Kit.”
“They didn’t like to share that part of themselves aside from with people that they were closest to or trusted with that information,” Amythist said.
Amythist and Kit attended the same school until COVID-19 required them to take school online. “We texted all the time. We FaceTimed, you know, we called,” Amythist said.
The last time Amythist saw Kit in person was for their 16th birthday, which was on April 22, 2021. It was a quick interaction, but the pair wanted to exchange birthday gifts, as Amythist’s birthday is two days after Kit’s.
A few days after that birthday reunion, Kit got some horrible news: One of their brothers died on April 29, 2021. Amythist said that opened the door for Kit to reconnect with their mother. “They had told me that they’ve been talking to their mom. ‘My mom wants me to go see them, like, go see my mom and siblings and meet my siblings,’” Amythist recalled Kit saying.
So Kit made the decision to return to Omak, about a three-hour drive from Yakima. Amythist thought it would be a short-term trip. “They were like, ‘I think I’m just going to go for the week,’” she remembered Kit telling her.
That was the impression sister Charlotte was under, too. “The only thing I really thought about it was, ‘I’ll see them again,’” she said.
Of course, neither of them could have known then that they might never see Kit again.
After the week had passed, Amythist reached out to ask Kit how the trip was. “And I’m like, ‘You should call me when you get a chance. I want to know how everything went,’” she said. “And they said, ‘I’m actually still here.’”
That’s when Amythist learned Kit wouldn’t be home anytime soon. “I was happy that they were liking it so much that they wanted to stay, but I was really sad. Selfishly, I was really sad because I wanted to see them so bad,” she said.
Charlotte says her parents heard from Kit around the same time. “Kit called and said, ‘I want to do school here,’” she recalled. Charlie told Dateline he and Kit came to an agreement. “I told her, ‘OK, but you have to stay for the school year and then you can come back home,” he said.
Kit stayed in Omak.
EVERYTHING CHANGED
By September of 2021, Kit’s family in Yakima had a feeling something was wrong. “We kind of noticed a shift in the way that Kit was talking to my dad and my mom,” Charlotte said.
“My concern was [Kit] hadn’t called,” Charlie said. He says he last spoke to Kit not long after school started in 2021. He described Kit, who loved to draw, as “happy because [they were] going to be the assistant to the art teacher.”
After that, though, communication dwindled.
Amythist also noticed a change with her best friend. “We went from talking almost every day to every other day, to once a week, to once every couple weeks, and then once a month,” she said. “And I was like, ‘I miss you. I miss my friend.’”
“And then one day they messaged me and they said, ‘I’m really struggling here,’” Amythist recalled. Amythist says Kit expressed feelings of being overwhelmed and having too many responsibilities between school and helping take care of her younger siblings. Amythist says she encouraged Kit to come home to Yakima, but Kit said they couldn’t because they needed to be in Omak to help out with their younger siblings. “That was the first and only time they told me, you know, things — something’s wrong here.”
Amythist says her last conversation with Kit was on November 5, 2021.
At first, Charlotte didn’t think much of the lack of communication with Kit. But eventually, her feelings on the matter changed. She remembers being in a treatment facility at the time and having a conversation with her counselor about it. “I said, ‘I just feel like something’s up,’” she recalled. “‘I don’t know what’s going on and I feel weird.’”
One thing Charlotte was worried about was the way Kit looked in photos she had seen of them in Omak. “You could kind of see just a really major shift in the way that they were dressing,” Charlotte said. The dresses Kit was wearing were not typical of what Charlotte knew to be their style. “This was like prairie-style, like, super long, very floral prints. They just looked almost like an old lady, just not how Kit dressed.”
Charlotte describes Kit’s usual style as more androgynous. “T-shirts, sweats, joggers, you know, sometimes jeans,” she listed. “Usually boys’ shoes, short hair.”
Charlotte sought advice on what to do with her concerns. “My counselor said, ‘If you feel in your gut that something is wrong, then you guys need to call the cops and have them do a wellness check,’” she said.
Charlotte and Charlie told Dateline they called the Omak police on November 27, 2021. “I asked for there to be a wellness check done. And my dad called to get the results of the wellness check,” Charlotte said. “They said that Kit was fine.” Dateline reviewed the department’s investigative report, provided by Charlotte, which states that Kit “came to the door and advised that she was fine and that she was safe.”
In the months that followed their last communication, Amythist says she sent a handful of messages to Kit with no response. “January 1st was me saying ‘Happy New Year, Kit.’ And then on March 28th, I said, ‘Hey.’ And then on April 27th, I said, ‘Hey, how are things?’” Amythist continued messaging through the summer of 2022. “Absolutely no response,” she said. According to Amythist, those messages haven’t been viewed.
“A MILLION RED FLAGS”
In September 2022, Charlotte got a call from Amythist asking if she’d been in touch with Kit. “I was like, ‘No, haven’t heard anything from Kit,’” Charlotte said. “And Amythist was like, ‘OK, well, I haven’t heard from Kit since last year.’”
If Charlotte thought she was worried before, now it was off the charts. “I was like, ‘Well, now there’s a million red flags going off because that’s Kit’s best friend,” Charlotte said. “And so my entire thought process and demeanor changed on the situation.”
Amythist decided she needed to go to Omak to look for Kit herself. She and her grandmother went to the police department and asked them to conduct a wellness check on Kit. It didn’t take long for them to get back to Amythist with some information. “They tell me that apparently Kit had been missing since April,” she said. “The blood rushed to my face. I started crying instantly.”
“They’re like, ‘Well, their mom said that they ran away with some girlfriend back to Yakima,’” Amythist recalled being told. Dateline attempted to contact Kit’s mother for comment, but has not been able to get in touch with her.
“I call Charlotte, Charlotte starts freaking out,” Amythist said.
“So I was like, ‘Well, we need to figure something out. We need to do something. We need to file a missing persons report. We need to get on top of this,’” Charlotte said. “‘Even if Kit did really want to run away, they’re a minor — we need to get them home.’”
Amythist says she started contacting everyone Kit followed on Instagram, trying to figure out when exactly Kit was last seen or heard from. Charlotte and Amythist believe Kit had to have gone missing sometime before April of 2022. “The kids from Kit’s school said that they never came back [after winter break],” Amythist said. According to an article on Kit’s case by InvestigateWest, “The Omak School District withdrew Kit for truancy in January 2022, after 33 days of unexcused absences since the beginning of the school year.” Dateline contacted the Omak School District to confirm this, but has not heard back.
“I’m actually positive that Kit would have went missing in late 2021,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know if it was fall or winter, but I know that it was long before April of 2022.”
Charlie Groo told Dateline that if he and his wife, Bonnie, had known Kit wasn’t going to school, he would have gone to pick up Kit immediately. “No matter what,” Charlie said. “I would have went up and got [Kit].”
Some of Kit’s classmates and others from Yakima went to Omak to help search rivers and other areas of note. “We all went up there, putting flyers up and searching,” Bonnie said. Nothing was found. “I feel like by the time that they had started searching, it was too late,” Amythist said.
Dateline reached out multiple times to the Omak Police Department to discuss the investigation into Kit’s disappearance, but did not hear back. In response to a follow-up email with specific questions, Detective Brien Bowling, the detective assigned to Kit’s case, replied that he could not answer any of our questions “without compromising the investigation.”
The department has a post about Kit pinned to the top of their Facebook page from March 2023. “Esmerelda “Kit” Mora was reported as missing to the Omak Police Department in September 2022,” the post states. “The last known contact with Kit by friends or family was April 2022.”
In its post the department described the investigation as active and said it has been collaborating with the Colville Tribal Police Department and the FBI.
The post stated Kit’s disappearance is considered “suspicious.”
In August 2024, Omak PD posted an update on their Facebook page, saying it was now also partnering with Washington State’s Office of the Attorney General’s Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and People (MMIWP) Cold Case Unit. Dateline contacted the unit for an interview, which confirmed the department is assisting in the investigation but also declined to comment due to the active nature of the case.
The August 2024 post from the Omak PD also stated that “the Washington State Patrol Forensic Crime Lab conducted a search warrant” at an Omak residence. “When the crime lab has more information about the case that can be released, we will update the community,” it said. “Until then we have no further information to provide.”
The Omak Police Department stressed its commitment to solving Kit’s case. “Like many in our community, we are deeply committed to finding answers to what happened to Kit Mora,” the post reads.
AN UPHILL BATTLE
“Progress on Kit’s case has been slow, to say the least,” sister Charlotte Reckard told Dateline. “We’ve gotten what feels like a million rumors, but there hasn’t been anything real happening.”
“I could go on for days about theories of what happened, but the truth is, is that I don’t know,” best friend Amythist McCart said. “I want to know what happened and who had something to do with it so that they can be brought to justice.”
Kit Mora has now been missing for more than three years.
“We haven’t had, you know, an arrest made. We haven’t had a body found. We haven’t had any of Kit’s stuff found. We haven’t had anything, really,” Charlotte said. “It’s just been a lot of circumstantial things.”
Charlotte feels Kit’s story should have more attention. “Kit has a lot of things against them. Kit is Indigenous. Kit is non-binary. Kit is a teen that was labeled as a runaway,” Charlotte said. “If, you know, they were someone else that wasn’t, you know, all of those things, I feel like their case would have blown up.”
Earlier this year, NBC News reported that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) was “removing all references to transgender people from its public materials.” This announcement came shortly after President Trump signed an executive order “which bars federal funding that goes to ‘gender ideology’ and makes it the official policy of the federal government not to recognize their gender identity.” Kit’s case has been relisted on NCMEC with their given name and a reference that “the child may go by the name Kit.”
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS) has also acted on the executive order. NamUs currently has a notice at the top of its website stating that the “Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance. During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable.” Kit’s case was briefly removed from the site but has now been relisted there, also under their given name.
The other challenge Kit faces is by being Indigenous. In 2021, the Washington legislature established the MMIWP Task Force “to understand and address the systemic causes of violence against Indigenous people,” according to a post on the Washington State Attorney General Office’s website. Administered by the AG’s office, the task force includes the MMIWP Cold Cases Unit. Its mission is “to review and attempt to solve missing person and cold homicide cases involving persons of indigenous ancestry, [who] go missing and are murdered at a higher rate than other demographics.”
According to a 2024 article in The Columbian, “Indigenous people make up 2 percent of the general population but account for 5 percent of unsolved cases” in Washington. The state also “ranks second highest in the nation for missing and murdered Indigenous women.”
“Washington State has huge MMIP numbers. I mean, we have a serious problem. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had that MMIP cold case task force opened,” Charlotte said. “It’s huge, and people don’t acknowledge it nearly enough.”
“These past few years have been extremely eye-opening,” Charlotte said. “There’s a lot of support out there for people who are experiencing the same thing that our family is.” Amythist agrees. “It’s insane to see the amount of people that actually care about somebody that they don’t know,” she said.
Charlotte has made it her mission to spread the word as far as she can. She started the Facebook page “Finding Kit,” where she shares information about Kit’s disappearance and updates on the case. She says she’s had moments when she felt as if nothing would ever come of the search for Kit. “But ultimately, at the same time, it’s a lot of self-motivation, because you know that if you stop, you’re never gonna find anything. You have to keep going. You don’t have a choice. I mean, you have to keep being loud. You have to keep saying something. You have to keep Kit’s face out there,” Charlotte said. “It’s just never-ending.”
“I want people to know that regardless of anything– regardless of what anybody believes, how they feel about how Kit identifies, Kit matters. Kit is an important person. Kit deserves peace. Kit deserves justice,” Charlotte said.
Today is Kit’s 20th birthday. Amythist’s is in two days. “They don’t get to celebrate with me,” Amythist said. “We don’t get to have that milestone together.”
Kit is 5’6” and weighed about 190 lbs., at the time of their disappearance. They have brown eyes and black hair.
The family is offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who gives information that leads to Kit or Kit’s remains, “excluding if the individual had a direct hand in harming Kit.” “I put up the reward,” Charlie Groo told Dateline. “It’s still in the bank. If anybody comes up with the information, I’d be more than happy to pay for it.”
Anyone with information about Kit’s whereabouts is asked to call the Omak Police Department at 509-826-0383. You can also contact the Attorney General’s Office MMIP Cold Case Unit at 844-770-7900 or crjmmiwp@atg.wa.gov.
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