(COLORADO SPRINGS) — A mother is desperately trying to find out what happened in the last hours of her daughter’s life. She says the answers lie in her daughter’s iPhone, which is currently missing in Colorado Springs.
“Did she lay down somewhere? Did someone pick her up? Did she go someplace else? Where was she?” asked Dana Anderson, seeking answers from the night her daughter, Katelin Anderson, died.
The night of Katelin’s death, Dec. 21st, 2022, was during an arctic blast. The weather was described as life-threatening. Temperatures that week reached double-digit negatives.
According to accounts from friends, that night, Katelin went out to celebrate the end of the semester at Pikes Peak State College and grab drinks with friends. She was wearing a cropped long-sleeve shirt with no jacket.
The group of friends made their way to Cowboys nightclub, then after getting fairly intoxicated, they took an Uber to the next bar, The Whiskey Baron Dance Hall & Saloon.
“When they took the Uber from Cowboys to Whiskey Baron, we believe that’s when she lost her phone in the Uber. Because her Apple Watch and her phone disconnected there,” said Dana.
At that point, Katelin, with no phone, got separated from her friends. Security footage shows her wandering around the Erindale Shopping Center, until all of a sudden she is nowhere to be seen.
“We have this time frame from 10:40-ish to 3:00 a.m. that we don’t know where she was… They found in her boots that she had sticks, dirt, and mulch…There’s no mulch in that area,” said Dana.
Anderson’s mother said they scoured the area looking for where this dirt and mulch could be from but did not find any. She believes there is more to the story of her daughter’s death. That something happened in this four-hour time period.
“I’m just wondering, where were you? What were you doing?” Dana asks.
Katelin’s Apple Watch was tracking her location that night, but her mother cannot access the data from it without Katelin’s iPhone.
It is a pink iPhone 13 with a clear case. Dana has been tracking it through the Find My iPhone app which has been sending notifications when the phone turns on. The latest notification was just two weeks ago, on Feb. 9. The notification said it was turned on, at the Citadel Mall. This was the second notification at the Citadel Mall since Katelin’s death.
“Someone has it… I thought it was a lost cause until it was turned on,” said Dana, hopeful that she will find it.
Through the Find My iPhone app, Dana has been sending alerts and sending messages that ask them to call her phone number. But so far, there has been no response.
Around 3:00 a.m. is when Katelin re-appears on security footage in the parking lot of McCloskey’s Truck Town, about half a mile away from the Erindale Shopping Center where she was seen earlier. Security footage shows her wandering around, before she lied down in the lot around 4:00 a.m., near the side of one of the McCloskey’s buildings.
Snow plow drivers found her in that lot around 8:00 a.m. the next morning. The coroner pronounced her dead on the scene – the cause of death – hypothermia.
Her mother recalled what she was thinking when the police delivered the news to the family that morning.
“How can this be? How can this be,” Dana said with tears in her eyes.
“She had come home for Thanksgiving… That was the last time that I had seen her… I watched her pull out of the driveway at the door and waved at her,” said Dana, who currently lives in Kansas.
If you know anything about the whereabouts of this phone, contact Dana at her phone number (913)-526-8582 or her email: only4dana@yahoo.com
By finding this iPhone, Dana is just hoping to get closure – wishing she could tell her daughter these words just one last time:
“I love you so much. And I miss you,” Anderson said.
