It’s been more than seven months since Marty Arnett has heard from her daughter, Amber.
Thirty-nine-year-old Amber Arnett was supposed to be returning to Lansing, Michigan to stay with her mother for a few days in June of 2023. She had been staying with a friend in the nearby town of Leslie, Michigan at the time.
Marty told Dateline she had expected her daughter to be home on June 25. She prepared for the visit, buying some of Amber’s favorite foods and stocking up on toiletries for her daughter’s arrival.
However, June 25th came and went, and there was no sign of Amber.
“I thought I would hear from her on the 25th,” Marty told Dateline. “Didn’t hear from her.”
“So I tried to reach out to her, and when I still hadn’t heard from her by 4th of July, I knew something was up,” Marty said. “I called the jails, I called the hospitals, I called the morgue, started calling around.”
But no one had seen or heard from Amber. “I knew something was off by then,” Marty said. “And I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give her a couple more days, and then I’ll file a missing person’s report.’”
Marty said when she still hadn’t heard from her daughter the following week, she decided to report her missing to the Lansing Police Department.
Dateline spoke to Amber’s sister-in-law, Kortni, who said that she knew something was wrong when Amber had not responded to her niece — Kortni’s stepdaughter.
“My stepdaughter reached out to her on Snapchat, and it’s very unlike Amber to not reply to my stepdaughter,” Kortni said. “She loved that child more than anything. It’s her only niece, and she would do anything for her.”
Marty told Dateline that in the months prior to her disappearance, Amber had gotten in trouble and lost her job as a live-in caretaker at an adult foster care home. She had a court date in the matter scheduled for July 13, 2023.
According to Marty, Amber said she was coming home to Lansing for a few days in June because she did not feel safe where she was staying, but never elaborated on why. Marty said the friend Amber had been staying with told her that Amber left Leslie to head home on June 22 and she hadn’t heard from her since.
Public Relations Director Jordan Gulkis of the Lansing Police Department told Dateline in an email that Amber was last seen at a Dollar Tree on S. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Lansing, Michigan on June 25, 2023 around 2:00 p.m. Gulkis would not comment further as she said it is an ongoing investigation.
Marty told Dateline that she gained access to her daughter’s Facebook account, which indicates that Amber went to visit a friend that evening in a neighborhood just blocks away from Marty’s home. Marty said there was a message sent by Amber to the friend saying that she had arrived, and needed him to come and open the gate.
“Her post was to one of the people that’s living there and said, ‘Hey, I’m at the gate. Come and let me in.’ And that was it,” Marty told Dateline. “That’s the last thing anybody’s heard from her.”
Amber’s family believes foul play was involved in her disappearance.
The family said they’re desperate to find Amber. They describe her as caring and loyal. “She was one of the most giving people you’d ever want to meet,” Marty told Dateline. “She would give whatever she had to you. Loyal to a fault.”
Kortni echoed Marty’s sentiments. “She’s just a caring person,” Kortni said of her sister-in-law. “And if there was the last shirt on her back, she would give it to you in a heartbeat, no questions asked.”
Kortni said the family has organized two official search parties for Amber, both of which turned up nothing. But they refuse to give up searching for answers. “I can’t tell you how many flyers we’ve put up in our area. Whenever I travel, I take them with me. I put them in truck stops, rest areas. We’ve had a couple of search parties with no results,” Marty told Dateline. “I’m just going to keep knocking on doors.”
Marty and Kortni also turned to social media in the hope of spreading awareness about Amber’s case. They started a Facebook group called “Help us find Amber.”
“We felt that her story wasn’t getting out enough, and we’ve all seen the power of social media, so it doesn’t cost us anything. It doesn’t hurt anything to start the Facebook page. And that was, like, one of the first things we did. And we organized search parties on there. If we have an event, we’ll put it on there,” Kortni told Dateline. “It just takes that one little puzzle piece to be given to us to where we can bring her home. It takes one person to say something.”
Amber would be 40 years old today. She is 5’4” and weighed 150 lbs. at the time of her disappearance. She was last seen wearing a black tank top with white writing, blue jeans and black tennis shoes.
A private reward is being offered by the family for information leading to Amber’s whereabouts.
Anyone with information regarding Amber’s disappearance is asked to contact the Lansing Police Department at 517-483-4600.
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