Teekah Lewis

October 13, 2025·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

Teresa told Tika 'I'll be right back,' rolled the ball down the lane, turned around — and her two-year-old was gone.

Teekah was two. She was at New Frontier Lane's bowling alley in Tacoma with her mother, Teresa, and several relatives on the night she disappeared. Teekah was playing in the arcade. Teresa looked away briefly to bowl, and when she turned back, her daughter was gone. The family searched the building corner by corner, hoping she had wandered just out of sight. Nothing turned up. The episode stays with that empty space while Teresa talks about the years after, a search that has never really ended. She believes someone knows something. Again and again, her account comes back to the same fact: Teekah has been gone for 25 years, and nothing of her was found. Teresa also talks about what she says she learned later, when people told her about troubling incidents tied to the bowling alley. One involved a bathroom. Another, she says, involved an attempted abduction two weeks before Teekah vanished. On that same day, Teresa says, a father caught a man trying to kidnap his children at a park within half a mile of the bowling alley. Her frustration is hard to miss. If families had warned police or the community, she says, she would never have taken her daughters there. The bowling alley later came down, and Teresa says it was torn down a year after Teekah disappeared because business had fallen away. The episode also leaves room for Teresa's questions about people around her in 1999, including a military boyfriend who had asked her to marry him. It does not solve those suspicions. It keeps them beside the timeline, with the focus on a child who vanished in a busy place and a mother who will not let the case fade.

As heard by us

A missing-child case told with patience, grief, and a steady refusal to let it become spectacle.

The episode stays with the disappearance of 2-year-old Tika Lewis from New Frontier Lane's bowling alley in Tacoma, Washington, and it gives most of its attention to Teresa Lewis's grief, anger, and the years of not knowing that followed.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a missing-child case that keeps Teresa Lewis and Tika at the center of a 25-year search.

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