A Georgia Girl Said Bye to Her Mom As She Went to a Neighbor's Home to See Puppies. She Hasn't Been Seen Since.

An 11-year-old girl left home almost 25 years ago to see a neighbor's puppies. Described as everyone's "best friend" by her mother, that was the last time anyone could account for the girl.

Teresa Dean went missing in Macon, Georgia, on Aug. 15, 1999, and she hasn't been seen since. She would now be 37 years old.

“She was in and out like she usually does,” Dorothy Dean, Teresa’s mother, told The Macon Telegraph in 2000. “She said, ‘Bye, Momma, I’ll see you later,’ and then she left.”

Unfortunately for the family, the child's final words have not rung true after more than two decades. Police arrived that evening but never located her, according to NBC News.

“Drove up and spoke to Dorothy Dean, Teresa's mother. She was kind of frantic, a little bit, to say that her daughter left and went down to a friend's house earlier in the evening and never showed up back home," Captain Chip Stokes, Twigg’s County chief investigator, told WMGT in 2015.

According to WMGT, the sheriff's office hasn't given up hope about solving the case, and deputies still gets tips and review the files.

“We continue to run down every possibility You like to think that something like that is possible because I mean if you look back there are people who escaped from prison and lived out the rest of their life until they die of old age,” Twiggs County Sheriff Darren Mitchum has said.

WGMT reported that investigators interviewed several people in connection with the case, but nothing came up. They say no one saw what happened to Dean.

“We made a grid of the neighborhood where she lived and a perimeter on the outside of that. Probably within about a 5-mile radius surrounding the neighborhood she lived in,” Mitchum once noted.

Police received help searching places like local bodies of water from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation but kept coming up empty.

“I could not imagine having a son or daughter that just vanishes. I don’t believe people just vanish off of the face of the earth. Something happened to them and most of the time, somebody knows what,” Mitchum said.

According to NBC, there has been speculation online that Dean's case may be linked to the disappearance of two other girls who vanished from the area in 2001 and 2003. Web sleuths claim there was a construction site nearby where all three disappeared.

Still, no one has been charged.

The Twiggs County Sheriff's Office urges anyone with information to contact the agency at (478) 945-3357.