Fifty-year-old Dana Ammons loves the beach. That’s why she moved to Havelock, North Carolina, just half an hour from her favorite spot: Atlantic Beach. “She wanted to be near the beach,” daughter Katelyn Lane told Dateline.
Katelyn lives about an eight-hour drive away in western North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. She says her mom liked living in Havelock, but was “really isolated” because she had no family nearby. “She was living in a duplex by herself,” Katelyn said. “She had a hard time making friends, ‘cause she was shy.”
Katelyn tried to encourage her mother to join social groups and try new hobbies to meet new people. “She’s always been really sweet and kind,” Katelyn said. “She’s just a great person. She just -- she struggles with her mental health.” Katelyn describes her mother as having “auditory and visual schizophrenia,” and says Dana experienced a lot of change in April: She got a new medical care team, quit her job, and stopped taking her medication.
In May, Dana asked Katelyn to start using Life360, an app designed to help families keep track of one another to stay safe. “We had it before, but she was really nosy, so she would always, like, watch my every move and then get onto me if I’m speeding or something,” Katelyn said. So Katelyn stopped using it. When her mom asked her to use the app again, Katelyn recalls her saying “that if she got lost, um, she would want somebody to be able to find her.”
Just weeks later, Dana vanished.
Piecing together what happened around the time of Dana’s disappearance has been complicated, as Chief Mike Broadwell of the Havelock Police Department told Dateline. “It’s a little complex,” he said. “This is a multi-jurisdictional case.” His department is working with the Craven County Sheriff’s Office and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) on Dana’s case.
Sergeant Anita Guerrero of the Havelock Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Division shared some key details via email. She wrote that on June 30, Dana’s care team went to the Havelock Police Department to report that they had not seen Dana since June 19.
A Havelock patrol officer then “attempted to contact Dana at her residence and by phone but was unsuccessful,” Sgt. Guerrero wrote. “A BOLO (Be on the Lookout) was sent to all agencies within a 50-mile radius.”
Chief Broadwell told Dateline there were no noticeable issues during the welfare check. “Nobody was home, um, nothing missing. No -- no signs of breaking and entering,” he said.
According to Sgt. Guerrero, on June 30, a Craven County Sheriff’s Office deputy informed Havelock PD that deputies had responded to a dealership “regarding a female subject matching Dana’s description who walked away and left her vehicle at the business” on June 22.
Authorities learned Dana went to the Riverside Chrysler dealership located between Havelock and New Bern, along U.S. 70. “Dana gets out at this car lot and starts talking to one of the car lot folks about looking at a truck,” Chief Broadwell told Dateline. “She started acting a little strange.”
The car salesman “said that she got a little agitated,” Katelyn told Dateline. “She was childlike, confused, and disoriented.” Katelyn says she learned her mother went into the woods next to the dealership for a little bit, and when she came out of the woods, she “ran blindly towards the busy highway.”
“She left her car there with the keys in it and everything, and all her belongings,” Chief Broadwell said. “So we now have her car, we have her keys, we have her wallet.”
Katelyn says Dana left the dealership around 10:30 a.m. At some point, she crossed the highway. “Between 10:37 and 10:40, she appeared down the road walking against traffic.”
In a press release, Havelock PD stated that Dana “was last seen on video surveillance on June 22, 2026, at approximately 10:37 a.m. on foot near Caballus Trailers LLC (4605 U.S. 70), located between Havelock and New Bern, N.C.” She was traveling in the direction of New Bern.
The press release also noted concern for Dana’s safety because of the extreme weather conditions at the time of her disappearance. “It was 105 heat index every day,” Broadwell told Dateline. “Ammons is believed to be traveling on foot in hazardous weather, raising significant concern for her safety,” the release continued. “Due to the severe weather and the potential risk it poses, locating her as quickly as possible is a priority.”
“She gets seen on camera walking down that highway,” Broadwell said. “Not seen picked up. She’s not in distress. She just, uh, walked away.”
“After that, we have no idea,” Katelyn told Dateline.
That surveillance footage contains the last known images of Dana Ammons. She was wearing a white T-shirt and black jogger athletic pants with a white stripe down each leg, and white shoes.
Sergeant Guerrero said in an email that the “dealership stated they called the Craven County Sheriff’s Office at approximately 2:00 p.m.” Dateline reached out to the Craven County Sheriff’s Office to ask about the steps they took after they got the call, but has not heard back.
“We did interview the folks from the car lot, and we interviewed all the local businesses,” Chief Broadwell said of his department. “Checked surveillance cameras in that area, and did a -- did a lot of legwork down there.”
On July 2, Dana was officially reported missing by her son-in-law, Katelyn’s husband. Havelock PD entered Dana into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database as an ‘Endangered Missing Person’ and issued an updated BOLO. Dana was also entered into the North Carolina Center for Missing Persons database at that time.
“I was just kind of in shock for a little bit,” Katelyn told Dateline.
Then she remembered about the Life360 app they’d started using again in May. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna go on there and see where she was last.’”
According to Katelyn, Life360 showed Dana’s location history was last updated on June 19, three days before she was seen at the dealership. “I don’t know if her phone died or if she turned off location permissions,” Katelyn said. She wasn’t sure her mom could have done that, though, as she often struggles with technology. “She didn’t really know how to do stuff like that.”
According to Sgt. Guerrero’s email, on July 4, “Havelock Investigators executed a search warrant on Dana’s residence,” and her cell phone was located.
Katelyn says she and her husband headed to Havelock to look for Dana as soon as they could. “We tried to retrace her steps,” she said. They looked at campgrounds, homeless encampments, and shelters. “We didn’t have any luck.”
They also checked Dana’s favorite spot: Atlantic Beach. “Which would’ve been way too far for her to walk, but we -- we searched anyway,” Katelyn said. “We drove from one end of the island to the other.”
Chief Broadwell told Dateline his department has not conducted a ground search of the woods along U.S. 70 for Dana. “We got thousands and thousands of acres of woods here,” he said. “We would do ground searches if we have a reason to believe she’s in a certain area.”
Havelock PD did go door-to-door in Dana’s neighborhood. “We did a search warrant on her house. We’ve done search warrants on her phone. We have reviewed the private security camera of her house,” Broadwell explained.
“We depend a lot on digital footprint. We depend a lot on, um, banking records and, uh, you know, social media posts and -- and different, uh, associations of -- of friends, families, boyfriends, girlfriends, that kind of stuff,” Broadwell said. “This individual did not have a huge network of any of those, so she’s not an easy person to find.”
“All of our normal investigative tools that we -- that we’re using are hitting dead ends right now,” the chief said. He thinks it’s possible Dana left on her own. “It’s still dangerous, you know, for anybody to leave home, um, and not tell anybody where they’re going. With any type of medical history, during, you know, extreme heat is not a good idea,” he said. “There is no evidence at all in this case to -- that would lead us to believe that there’s any foul play.”
Katelyn does not believe her mother intentionally disappeared, and after three months with no communication, she fears the worst. She says she’s run through many scenarios: Was Dana scared and running from something? Could she have been picked up along the highway? Did she maybe get hurt out there in the woods? “I don’t think she had the mental capacity to take care of herself,” she said.
At this point, Katelyn’s only hope is that more attention on her mom’s case will help bring her home. “I’m hoping that just more people see it and know about it,” she said. “I just wanna find my mom.”
Dana is about 5’4” and 190 lbs., with shoulder-length gray-ish hair and brown eyes. She has a butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder and angel wings on her back.
Chief Broadwell of the Havelock Police Department told Dateline his office is following up on every lead they receive; they just “don’t have a lot to go on right now.” They encourage anyone with information, no matter how small, to come forward. You can call the Havelock PD at 252-447-3212 or leave an anonymous tip online.
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