She Was 2 When She Vanished — And Nobody Reported It Until Her Mother Turned Up Buried in a City Park

Arianna Fitts is two and a half years old the last time anyone can place her.

It is Oakland. It is January or February of 2016. Police cannot give a date — only a window. And that window is the entire problem with this case.

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Arianna's mother, Nicole Fitts, is 32, working at a Best Buy in San Francisco. The hours are hard and childcare is harder, so Arianna has been staying with babysitters: Helena Hearne Martin and her husband, Devin Martin.

After that last sighting, Nicole is still around. Still in contact with people. From the outside, nothing appears to have collapsed.

Then on the night of April 1, 2016, Nicole disappears.

Four days later, on April 5, her family reports Nicole and Arianna missing — together, at the same moment. A little girl who has not been seen in roughly two months enters the system on the same day as her mother.

On the morning of April 8, workers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks are in McLaren Park when they find her. Nicole's body has been buried there. Her death is ruled a homicide.

Arianna is not with her.

Investigators come to believe Arianna had already been missing for weeks by the time Nicole was killed. The FBI has said it does not believe Arianna was present when her mother died. Police also believe Nicole was lured into meeting the babysitter.

Line the events up and the shape of it is unbearable. Child gone. Weeks pass. Mother lured to a meeting. Mother murdered and buried. Child still nowhere.

What did Nicole think had happened to her daughter during those weeks? Was she walking into that meeting to get her back?

There is an allegation from Nicole's own circle that answers half of it. Nicole had reportedly been trying for weeks to regain custody of Arianna, and the babysitters allegedly would not let her see or take her daughter. Her roommate says Nicole was planning to retrieve Arianna right around the time she vanished.

Investigators say Helena, Devin, and Helena's sister Siolo Hearne were initially uncooperative and gave inconsistent statements. The Martins declined to speak with reporters. The group retained a criminal-defense attorney.

Helena's attorney later explained the silence: he advised her to stop speaking with investigators because he believed police were treating her less like a witness and more like a possible suspect.

This was never a quiet investigation. The FBI executed search warrants at locations in Oakland, Emeryville and Daly City. In 2017, investigators seized a vehicle believed potentially connected to Nicole's murder and Arianna's disappearance, reportedly to test it for DNA evidence. The FBI's Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team and its Behavioral Analysis Unit both assisted.

And after all of it: nobody has been charged. Not with Nicole's murder, not with Arianna's disappearance. San Francisco police have never announced that any of the babysitters are formally responsible for either crime.

Online, the case has hardened into two camps.

The dominant read is brutal and simple. "I think Arianna perished under babysitters' care," one commenter said. "They lied to Nicole and she realized something wasn't right. When she lost all patience and tried to go get her child, they killed her."

Another asked the question that will not go away: "Why don't we know anything about what the babysitters said happened? They were cooperative at first. They must have said SOMETHING that helped them avoid charges."

The custody allegation draws the loudest reaction of all. "How on EARTH can this be legal?" one commenter wrote, stunned that a mother could allegedly be kept from her own child for weeks with no mechanism stopping it.

The counter-camp is quieter and, in its way, worse.

One commenter who worked in search and rescue offered a reason charges may never come. In recovery training, they said, if a child's remains are not found within roughly three months, they may never be found at all — because until around age ten, a child's skeleton is largely cartilage and soft tissue rather than hardened bone. Cartilage decomposes. Small bones break down easily. What is left may be a few fragments and teeth, and nothing a prosecutor can build a case on.

By that logic, the absence of charges is not a verdict of innocence. It is a forensic dead end.

Others in that camp note that lawyering up is what any competent attorney advises the second police stop treating you as a witness, and that federal warrants across three cities plus a vehicle pulled for DNA testing represent enormous investigative pressure that still produced nothing chargeable.

And one commenter raised something colder still — that another figure connected to this story, Lemasani Briggs, has since died of COVID. "She had the answer," they wrote.

There has been no confirmed sighting of Arianna since 2016. The FBI still lists her as missing and has released age-progressed images showing what she might look like now. She would be a teenager.

The San Francisco Police Department currently advertises a $250,000 reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible for Nicole's murder and Arianna's disappearance.

Ten years on, the sharpest question anyone has asked about this case remains the plainest one: why wasn't Arianna reported missing sooner?

The hosts of close look take this case apart on the show — and they do not agree on where it lands.