At 11:54 p.m. on April 15, 2020, a man driving east along Independence Boulevard in Wilmington, North Carolina, glanced into his passenger-side mirror. What he saw stopped him cold. A grey car had blown past him heading in the opposite direction at an impossible speed, failed to stop at the River Road intersection, struck a wall, and vanished into the dark tree line.
He pulled his Penske truck to the side of the road and called 911.Officers arrived. They spent roughly eight minutes searching. They found nothing. The call was cleared. All units were stood down.Stephanie Mayorga and Paige Escalera were still in that car. They would remain there for nineteen days.
A new life in Wilmington
Stephanie Mayorga was 27 years old and taking classes at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, working toward becoming a surgeon. Paige Escalera was 25, also studying, with her sights on a career in criminal justice. Her arms carried large tattoos, including a skull and the name “Laila,” and a beauty mark on her right cheek. Stephanie had a small wrist tattoo. Both, reportedly, had tattoos on their ring fingers as well.
The two had not known each other long. They became engaged and moved into an apartment together on South Kerr Avenue in March 2020, just weeks before they disappeared. Escalera’s sister Stevie Jenkins told Oxygen that the pair had only lived at the new apartment for about a week before they went missing.
Paige was working toward a career in criminal justice. Stephanie was taking classes at UNCW in hopes of becoming a surgeon. Both families described both women as having kind hearts and being known to help anyone in need. The last message Stephanie sent her mother read: “I love you, Mom.”
The last night
Surveillance footage from a neighbour’s camera captured Mayorga and Escalera leaving their South Kerr Avenue apartment on the evening of April 15, getting into Paige’s grey 2013 Dodge Dart with South Carolina plates, and heading north. Their departure appeared entirely normal.
Mayorga was wearing a black Nike sweatshirt with the slogan “Just Do It,” black leggings with white stripes, and black Nike shoes. Escalera wore a grey zip-up sweatshirt with white pull strings, black leggings, and black tennis shoes with a white stripe.They did not come back.
All signs in the apartment suggested the couple had intended to return that night. They left all of their personal property inside, including Escalera’s cellphone on the bed. Food they had ordered was found outside their door the following morning. Mayorga’s phone went dark sometime that same night and never came on again.
In the days that followed, Jenkins noticed something that had preceded the disappearance. Every one of Mayorga’s close friends, she found, had been blocked from Mayorga’s social media in the week or two before April 15. “It is normal for family to not hear from her,” Jenkins said, “but not her closest friends.” Police were later asked about this detail. It was among the information they declined to address publicly, citing sensitivity to the families.
The call that cleared
The 911 recording from 11:54 p.m. captures the witness describing what he saw with a specificity that would later prove exactly correct. He told the dispatcher he had been driving east on Independence Boulevard when a car blew past him heading west at a speed he could not account for. “Listen, this is like really serious,” he said.
“The car didn’t stop at the stop sign and keeps driving so fast. I was seeing with my back mirror, the car smashed the wall there.” As he waited on the line, he tried again: “The car like disappeared inside the tree.” He stayed at the scene and spoke to officers when they arrived.
Nine first responders were dispatched. Body camera footage later released under court order told a different story about what the search actually looked like. In the footage, the responding officer is shown briefly getting out of his patrol car to speak with the 911 caller, then driving through the area flashing a spotlight mounted to the vehicle. Escalera’s family had been under the impression that the nine first responders walked the area and checked for damage with flashlights. The footage showed something considerably less than that.
The body camera footage also revealed the broader context of that night. Officers in the area were simultaneously responding to a deadly shooting and two separate armed robberies. The crash call had been pending when they dispatched themselves to it.After approximately eight minutes, the scene was cleared. “We’re unable to locate any vehicle that appears to be crashed up and down River Road or near the intersections,” the officer said over the radio. “You can clear all units off of this.”
There was a reason nothing was found, and it had nothing to do with the witness being wrong. When the car was eventually recovered, investigators found that the battery had snapped clean in half on impact. That single mechanical fact explained everything. With the battery gone, there were no lights, no horn, no sounds of any kind coming from the wreck. In the dark, in dense vegetation, the car was silent.
Nineteen days in the dark
A missing persons report was not filed until April 19, when the couple’s roommate finally contacted police. She had been under the mistaken belief that she was required to wait 72 hours before reporting someone missing. By then, four days had passed.Over the two weeks that followed, the Wilmington Police Department received assistance from numerous area law enforcement agencies.
A SABLE helicopter and Marine 1 boat were deployed to search broad areas of interest. Those searches were focused near the Kerr Avenue apartment. Detectives conducted more than 1,600 man hours of work, processed more than 100 tips from across the United States and internationally, and interviewed family members, friends, co-workers, and past relations.
The 911 call from the night of April 15 was not connected to the missing persons case during any of this. It was only on May 4 that police discovered the 911 call from the night the women disappeared, in which the caller stated he had witnessed a car travelling at high speed, running a stop sign, and crashing near the intersection of River Road and Independence Boulevard. That same afternoon, the car was found.
Just after 3 p.m. on May 4, a grey 2013 Dodge Dart was located deep in the woods off River Road, near Watermark Marina, with two bodies inside. Drone footage released later showed that the vehicle, while completely invisible from ground level, had been visible from above at the time the police drone flew over the scene. The car had been there the entire time.
What the wreckage revealed
Because the bodies were badly decomposed, police used dental records and visible tattoos to make the identifications. Mayorga was confirmed as the driver. Escalera was the passenger. Their cause of death was the same: traumatic head and chest injuries sustained in the crash.
Deputy Police Chief Alex Sotelo announced at the press conference that investigators believe the women were travelling between 102 and 103 mph when the Dart struck a curb and went airborne. Because the ground in that area slopes downward into the tree line, the car continued at approximately 100 mph and rose more than 20 feet above the ground as it flew between the trees. Speed and alcohol were cited as the major contributing factors.
The Wilmington Police Department did not officially rule the deaths accidental, but did not suggest foul play or intentional self-harm was involved. The department said it believed the couple had intended to return home that evening, pointing to the food delivery, the cellphone left behind, and all personal property remaining in the apartment. Interim Police Chief Donny Williams noted that some information gathered during the investigation was being withheld out of respect for the families. That information has never been made public.
No answers, no accountability
An internal investigation was launched into the response to the original 911 call. No disciplinary action was taken against the officers involved. No policy changes were announced by the Wilmington Police Department.
Escalera’s family pushed back publicly. “What if it was your family?” said Allison Rice, Paige’s mother. “The worst thing is we just don’t know if they were alive. She could be alive, both Paige and Stephanie both could have been alive. That’s what really hurts us.”
The question she was asking was the same one that could not be answered then and cannot be answered now. The car battery broke on impact. The lights went out. The car flew 20 feet into the trees and sat in silence. What happened in the minutes after the crash, and whether anything could have changed the outcome, remains unknown.
Stephanie Mayorga was working toward becoming a surgeon. Paige Escalera was building a career in criminal justice. They had just gotten engaged. They had been in their new apartment for barely a week. The last thing Stephanie said to her mother was that she loved her.
