Emmie Brant, 15, is by all measures, a parent’s dream.
She earns all A’s, has scores of close friends, and has never warranted as much as a call to the principal’s office for misbehaving.
Her mother, Iola High School guidance counselor Melissa Stiffler, knows a thing or two about how teenagers think.
For the past 23 years she’s worked helping high school students, and is in her fourth year at IHS.
Their idyllic home life was thrown into a lurch a week ago Wednesday, when Emmie, a freshman at IHS, left her Woodson County home in the dark of night.
She and a 14-year-old friend were headed to California.
The intrepid, impulsive pair made it to the outskirts of Flagstaff, Ariz. — 1,248 miles away — in a span of 18 hours, before sideswiping a tractor-trailer unit on Interstate 40.
Not only did they come away unscathed from the accident, but it also may have saved their lives.
What confounds every adult, of course, is what would prompt such a youth to head out cross country with little more than the clothes on her back?
Stiffler has spent the past eight days asking herself that very question.
She hopes her answers will serve her family — and others.
While Stiffler admits culpability for several “mistakes” she had made in relation to her daughter, she also lays blame on the prevalence of cell phones.
“I know it’s simplistic to blame a cellular gadget for a young girl to run away,” she said. “I know the web is tangled and weaves back to more than just technology.
“But I also know this played a huge role in my daughter’s decisions on that dreary day. And it was a wake-up call to this mom who thought these devices were really harmless. I have spent the past 23 years of my life working with high school students. This ‘teenage mindset’ is very familiar to me.”
In the aftermath, Stiffler penned a letter to the Register, “as a warning to others to be smarter than me.”
“I’m writing this letter from the heart of a mother who loves her daughter and desperately wants to warn parents to wake up,” Stiffler said. “I wish for no other parent to wake up in the night and find their daughter gone.”
STIFFLER says her first mistake was giving her daughter a cell phone at too young an age.
Emmie’s first phone came when she was a fourth-grader.
The phone would be used to call her parents in case of an emergency.
Instead, it quickly became an avenue to remain in constant contact with her friends, and other acquaintances.
“As I have spoken with her friends the past few days I have discovered that every one of them — every single one of them — received a cell phone before they were in the sixth grade,” Stiffler noted.
And with more sophisticated models on the market on a nearly daily basis, many of the friends — Emmie included — became increasingly tech savvy, while remaining emotionally immature.
“The crucial age for brain development is from ages 12 to 15,” Stiffler explained. “The brain is revving up. It’s like a sponge.”
But one of the last portions of the brain to develop is the frontal lobe, the part that rationally analyzes risk behaviors. That part of the brain usually isn’t developed until a person is in her 20s.
“Not that that’s an excuse,” Stiffler said. “But it’s the danger of technology. It makes the world seem small and safe. California doesn’t seem that far away. Everybody talks to everybody on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and everyone is ‘friends,’ when you and I know that isn’t the case.”
“I THINK I saw red flags about a year ago,” Stiffler recalled. “Emmie was very dependent upon her phone, almost to the point she didn’t think she could live without it.”
With scores of seemingly close friends, her daughter had developed as Stiffler described a “herd-bound” mentality.
“My husband grew up around horses,” Stiffler explained. “Horses that are put out to pasture with other horses for long periods of time become ‘herd bound’ or ‘buddy sour.’ They form strong emotional attachments and become anxious and distressed when they are pulled away from the herd.”
That was where Emmie’s friendships enter the equation.
“My daughter grew up with an attachment to her friends through her cell phone,” Stiffler said. “She went to bed with it in her hands texting her friends. She woke up in the middle of the night with her friends texting her. This has been her pattern since fourth grade. She learned her validation in the people she connected to online.
“Even if those people were in California.”
EMMIE AND her friend — Stiffler asked that the other girl’s name not be used — had met, through the Internet, a pair of boys in Los Angeles months ago.
Stiffler knew this because her daughter had told her about the meeting when it happened.
“That was in December,” Stiffler said. “She told me about it, and she told me she didn’t want to talk to them any more. So we blocked everything on her phone.”
By May, Emmie’s friendship with the other girl had raised enough of a warning flag that Stiffler ordered the two to no longer communicate.
Stiffler takes the blame for the aftermath. “I let them be really close friends for too long.”
“But I cut that friendship off,” she added. “Not only did I not want her talking to her, I didn’t even want her talking about her friend around me. It was like trying to take a mare from its friend in a pasture.
“I didn’t realize the behavior that had already formed in middle school,” Stiffler said. “As a psychologist, I should have absolutely known this.”
As summer progressed, Emmie had seemingly put her friendship behind her.
She stayed busy by working at a restaurant in Yates Center, and kept in touch with several other close friends.
All was well until Emmie and her former friend saw each other at Yates Center High School’s homecoming dance in September, unbeknownst to Stiffler.
Emmie’s schoolmates showed her a few workarounds to the blocks imposed on her phone without her mother’s knowledge.
“The blockers don’t work if you have Wifi,” Stiffler said. “I bought a parent’s app that allows me to see every Website she visits on her phone, but I didn’t think I needed to use it.”
THE COMMUNICATION resumed, and suddenly the friend had a plea for help, asking Emmie to take her to California, to stay with the two friends they’d met months ago.
“She won’t admit it, but I think part of it was trying to help her friend,” Stiffler said.
Emmie left her home at 12:28 a.m. Oct. 14.
Stiffler knows the exact moment, because she has a DriveWise app that keeps track of when the car is in motion.
As Stiffler and her husband slept, her daughter was heading west.
“I woke up about 4:30, and at 5:15, I get a call from the other girl’s mom,” Stiffler said.
The mother was panicked, frantic. Her daughter was missing. She figured Emmie was, too.
Stiffler, in her groggy confusion, told the other mother it had to be a mistake. The girls no longer communicated.
“She just told me to check,” Stiffler said.
Sure enough, her daughter’s bed was empty.
“By the time we knew she was gone, they’d driven 257 miles and taken $300 out of Emmie’s bank account.”
Because she had her own job, Emmie also had her own bank account.
And her own debit card.
BY THEN THE police had arrived, and Stiffler, with the assistance of Yates Center Police Chief Lyle Kee, had begun tracking her daughter’s path.
Stiffler’s parent’s app revealed her daughter had Googled travel distances to Los Angeles — without toll roads.
In the aftermath, Emmie had told her mother she figured she might be spotted on a toll road.
She also purchased a GPS device in Pratt to navigate her way to California without having her cell phone on, which also could serve as a tracking device.
AS WEDNESDAY progressed, Stiffler and her family continued their search, pleading on Facebook for her daughter to contact them to let them know she was safe.
Friends from their church had stopped by.
“I don’t know what your world view is, but we were praying for her,” Stiffler said. “My friend said, ‘I’m gonna pray to stop that car.’”
Shortly after, Stiffler’s phone rang.
It was Emmie.
She had been in a wreck.
PERHAPS most remarkable about Emmie’s trek was how far she’d made it practically without stopping.
“The other girl had driven about 20 miles, before both girls agreed Emmie should drive the whole way,” Stiffler said.
At 15, Emmie lacks a driver’s license. She only recently had earned her learner’s permit.
Emmie admitted afterward guilt began to creep in as she crossed into New Mexico.
“She started crying,” Stiffler said. “She was ready to come back home.”
The sun had just set in Arizona, her friend was asleep, and Emmie was piling on the miles, when their newly acquired GPS fell from the dash.
She slowed the car to about 50 in order to grab the device when a large semi approached from behind.
“She said he ‘bright-lighted’ her in order to get her to speed up,” Stiffler said.
One problem.
Another semi was directly in front of her. So she veered into the passing lane.
Other problem.
Another semi was to her left.
The large truck’s lug nuts gashed into Emmie’s door.
That’s where Stiffler believed fate — perhaps divine intervention — stepped in.
Instead of doing what one officer estimated 90 percent of the other drivers would do — jerk her car back to the right, perhaps losing control — Emmie was able to pull to the side of the road.
Finding that the damage did not disable the car, her friend encouraged her to continue the trip.
But Emmie was done running. She was tired. She wanted to go home.
She called her mother, even before she called the police.
When a trooper arrived at the scene, Emmie admitted she was running away, had taken her parents’ car, and did not have a license.
“The officer said she was respectful and apologetic,” Stiffler said.
LOCAL POLICE took the two teens to a shelter for runaways in Flagstaff, where they spent the next two days, waiting for their parents to arrive.
Stiffler and her husband arrived there Friday evening.
“It took us 17 hours of driving,” Stiffler said. “I have no idea how she could have driven this far. Both my husband and I are seasoned drivers, and there’s no way we could have made it.”
Stiffler remembers the look in her daughter’s eyes when they met at the shelter.
“She had her head down in shame,” Stiffler said. “I just grabbed her and hugged her for 10 minutes. She said, ‘Mom, I thought you’d hate me.’
“That’s what makes me sad,” Stiffler said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Every parent would give their life for a child.”
THE two-day drive back was “wonderful,” Stiffler said — cathartic in many ways.
Stiffler and Emmie rode together, in the now-damaged car.
“I just let her talk for as long as she wanted,” Stiffler said. “We probably talked for eight hours. That’s the thing. I told her if she was that unhappy with me, she could have told me.
“But she wasn’t unhappy,” Stiffler continued. “This was just a big, impulsive, dumb thing they did.”
One of the ironies of the situation was that the night before the caper, Emmie did double-duty on her homework.
“I think she was planning to take her friend to California and turn around and come back,” Stiffler said.
EMMIE NO longer has her phone. (She doesn’t want one.) Stiffler said she’ll eventually get a basic phone with no Internet.
Stiffler, conversely, said she would relax her restrictions on Emmie staying in touch with her friend — provided Stiffler is there when they talk.
“I know parents can pull too hard on the reins,” Stiffler said, to borrow another equine metaphor.
“There’s so much I want to know about why my daughter, who I think is a great kid, why’d she do this,” Stiffler said. “I want to know why she felt so desperate and felt like she couldn’t tell me.
STIFFLER hopes the cautionary tale convinces other parents to wait on handing out cell phones to their children — for more ways than one.
She points to a recent paper noting the higher number of deaths of young pedestrians checking their phones as they walk into traffic.
“I’ve made mistakes, but I tried to protect my kids the best I could,” Stiffler said. “I just didn’t see the dangers of the cell phone I put in her hand.”
“I also want to thank Lyle Kee and the Yates Center Police Department and the Woodson County Sheriff’s Department,” Stiffler said. “In a day when our law enforcement is constantly being attacked, I can’t explain in words how grateful I am for all their help and support. They were genuinely concerned for my daughter and her friend and went above and beyond to try to locate these girls. When your family needs the assistance of the police, they are there.”
