She Reached For Her Scooter and Never Came Back

0:00 Michaela Joy Garrick was standing in the parking lot of the Rainbow Market in Hayward, California on the morning of November 19th 1988 when she realized she and her friend Katrina had forgotten their scooters. The first day of Thanksgiving break had started with such light -hearted energy. The girls had spent the morning practicing for their school Christmas pageant and after much pleading Michaela's mother Sharon had finally agreed to let them ride the two blocks to the store for snacks and sodas They had five dollars in their pockets a gift from Katrina's father But as they walked away from the market with their bags of beef jerky and candy They looked back and saw that one of the scooters was missing Michaela spotted it just a few spaces down Strangely tucked behind a car as the nine -year -old bent down to grab the handlebars The car door flew open.

0:59 A man stepped out, wrapped his right arm around her waist, and shoved her into the back seat. Katrina watched, frozen, as her best friend's screams were muffled by the closing door. The car, a dilapidated tan or gold sedan, sped south on a mission boulevard. And just like that, Michaela was gone. The disappearance of Michaela Garrett would become one of the most haunting cold cases in the history of the San Francisco Bay Area. Within 24 hours, sketches of the abductor were plastered across Northern California.

1:37 He was described as a white male in his early 20s, slender, with shoulder -length dirty blonde hair and a face deeply scarred by acne. The car was just as distinct. A large, older American sedan, possibly an Oldsmobile, missing its hubcaps and splattered with what looked like dried cement. Despite 5 ,000 tips in the first year alone and an investigation that involved the Hayward Police Department and the FBI scouring the hillsides by helicopter, the trail went cold. For decades, Sharon Merch would keep a yellow ribbon tied to a tree near that market.

2:18 She started a blog writing directly to her daughter. Buying her gifts for birthdays and graduations, she wasn't there to celebrate. She bought a Barbie doll for the high school graduation that never happened and a book titled, I promise I'll find you for Michaela's 18th birthday. The community never forgot the girl with the prominent ears and the feather shaped earrings. But as the years turned into decades, the hope of finding her alive began to flicker. The search for Michaela often felt like a series of cruel mirages.

2:55 In 2009, when J .C. Dugard was found alive after 18 years in captivity, investigators swarmed the property of her kidnapper, Philip Guarido. He lived only an hour away and had been released from prison just months before Michaela vanished. But no physical evidence linked him to her. Then in 2012, Attention shifted to the speed freak killers, Wesley Sherman -Teen and Loren Herzog. Sherman -Teen, from Death Row, claimed they had killed Michaela and buried her in a well. When bone fragments were discovered in a mass grave in Linden, Sharon Merch braced herself for the worst.

3:40 She even took the fragments home, waiting for the DNA results that would finally tell her if she was holding her daughter. But the lab results came back negative. The bones belonged to someone else. The mystery remained a gaping wound in the heart of Hayward until a dedicated cold case unit decided to look back at the original physical evidence with fresh eyes and modern technology. In 2020, forensic investigators returned to the scooter Michaela had reached for in that parking lot 32 years earlier.

4:16 Back in 1988, technicians had managed to lift a partial palm print and a thumbprint from the frame. But at the time, there was no match in the system. With the advancement of digital scanning and automated fingerprint identification, a Hayward fingerprint examiner ran the prints again against a specific list of suspects. This time, the computer didn't just find a possibility, it found a hit. The Prince belonged to David Emery Mish. At the time of the kidnapping, Mish was 27 years old. He matched the fox -eye description given by Katrina perfectly.

4:57 Even more chilling was the realization of where he had been that day. Prosecutors later revealed that on November 17th, 1988, just two days before the kidnapping, it would have been the first birthday of Mish's infant son. who had died months earlier. The baby was buried in the Chapel of the Chimes Cemetery, located directly across the street from the Rainbow Market. Investigators believe Mish was at the cemetery visiting his son's grave when he spotted the two young girls on their scooters and began to plan his attack.

5:35 David Mish was not a new name to the legal system. When the charges were announced in December 2020, He was already serving a sentence of 18 years to life for the 1989 murder of Marber Ball in Hayward. He had beaten and stabbed her to death in her own home just a year after Michaela disappeared. But his trail of violence went back even further. In 2018, he had been charged with the 1986 murders of two best friends in Fremont, Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Dewey. Those two young women, aged 18 and 20, had been found shot and stabbed along a remote road after attending a birthday dinner.

6:22 For 30 years, that case had also been cold until DNA found under Jennifer Dewey's fingernails was matched to Mish. When he finally stood trial for the Fremont murders in late 2024, the courtroom witnessed the true nature of the man. Mish was frequently disruptive, at one point singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall while the victim's families were delivering their emotional impact statements. In December 2024, a jury found him guilty of two counts of first degree murder. And in January 2025, he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life.

7:05 The resolution of Michaela's case, however, remains caught in the gears of the legal system. In 2023, the Alameda County District Attorney's Office made the controversial decision to drop the special circumstances enhancements against Mish, which would have guaranteed life without parole or the death penalty. This move sparked outrage from victims advocates who argued it removed the leverage needed to pressure Mish into revealing where he hid Michaela's remains. Mish has never cooperated with investigators, and to this day, her body has never been found.

7:46 One theory suggests he may have left her in the wooded areas near Niles Canyon, but searches have yielded nothing. Tragically, Sharon Merch passed away from breast cancer in May 2022, never having the chance to see the man who took her daughter face a jury for that specific crime. She died knowing his name. but not knowing where her daughter lay. As of June 2026, David Mish remains in custody at the Santa Rita jail in Dublin, awaiting trial for the kidnapping and murder of Michaela Gehrig. He is 65 years old, a man whose life has been defined by a series of brutal, calculated crimes against women and children, often committed just days or months after being released on parole for previous offenses.

8:37 The Rainbow Market is now a different grocery store under a different name, but the memory of that Saturday morning in November 1988 still hangs over the corner of Mission Boulevard and Lafayette Avenue. The case is a testament to the fact that while technology can eventually catch up with the past, it cannot always heal the silence that a single violent act leaves behind. Michaela would have been in her mid -40s today, perhaps living the life her mother so vividly imagined for her in those blog posts.

9:14 Instead, she remains a symbol of a community's lost innocence and a mother's ironclad promise to never stop looking, even when the world moved on. If you found this story compelling, please share it with someone who values the pursuit of justice for those who can no longer speak for themselves. And that's how I heard it.