Missing: Sara Ebersole
Sara Ebersole, who is about 5’2” tall and 116 lbs with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, was last known to be in Reddick, FL, sometime after midnight on March 3, 2023.
She was last seen wearing a white tank top and a black skirt and has a tattoo on her lower right hip of Kokopelli, a fertility deity.
The 26-year-old lived with a roommate and worked as an exotic dancer in the Reddick area. Sara reportedly had over $1000 cash on her person that she made at work on the night she went missing.
On March 31, 2023, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office posted a press release about Sara’s disappearance. According to the post, Sara was last seen on security footage on March 2, 2023, at around 10:00 P.M., near a Circle K gas station in Reddick, Florida.
The Sheriff’s Office added that Sara left the Circle K willingly in a black pickup truck with two unknown males.
She had been hanging out with people she met earlier that night, according to her sister, Michelle Tullis, who told Dateline that Sara had texted her at 10:11 P.M. saying that she was “getting into a random truck with some cowboys” and that she “hoped they took her on a ride.”
Sara had gotten off of work around 7:00 P.M. and sent a text message to her sister asking for a ride home, but her sister was unavailable. Around 7:50 P.M. she sent another text, telling her sister to say “hi” to her children.
Her phone was active until 2:58 A.M., when her Gmail app finished syncing. Her phone reportedly watching YouTube videos until 2:40 A.M.
Michelle told Dateline that they drove to a home in Reddick, and that she spoke to one of the roommates at the home who told her that Sara left in a blue vehicle between 3 A.M. and 5 A.M.
Michelle said that her sister was a “free spirit” who “thinks everything is sunshine and rainbows.”
It later emerged that Sara was with James Michael Robinson, aka Bubba, at his residence on North Highway 441 in Reddick. James Schaller and Tesesha McDermitt, who also lived in the home, were also present.
Public Information Officer Zach Moore of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said the men that Sara was with have been interviewed by law enforcement.
According to a witness, she left the residence in a newer model blue sedan believed to be a Hyundai driven by a Hispanic male in his thirties with long dark hair and a thin build.
Although the witnesses said they thought the car might be an Uber, police determined that Sara didn’t call for an Uber on the night she disappeared.
Michelle posted a Facebook Reel in which she discusses Sara’s tumultuous history with an ex named Joseph Merlyn Mayton, who allegedly physically attacked Sara while she was pregnant.
She did not file a police report but did get a restraining order, according to the post, which says that Joe disappeared to Kentucky after this. According to a Gainesville police incident report, Mayton worked at a Hyundai dealership as recently as 2020.
On January 23, 2023, Sara changed her phone number and messaged Michelle about Joe accessing her device again. He had allegedly been logging into her Google account, allowing him to monitor her location, emails, texts, and photos. On January 29, 2023, Sara began using a new device, an iPhone 8.
On March 29, 2023, less than a month after Sara went missing, Joseph Merlyn Mayton was allegedly arrested for assault and battery on a 75 year old male.
Michelle has a GoFundMe to raise funds to help her seek custodianship of Sara’s daughter, Dahlia “Cora” Mayton, aged 5, whose father has primary custody in a co-parenting arrangement with Sara.
“I just feel like Sara’s probably not alive wherever she is,” Michelle said. “She’s never gone even a week without speaking to somebody and getting on social media.”
On December 6, 2023, Marion County Search and Rescue used cadaver dogs to search the property where Ebersole was last seen alive. Frank Marino, the Director of Marion County Search and Rescue, led a team of volunteers, which used their dogs to catch a trace of something, leading the volunteers to turn the scene over to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office for further investigation.
Police later named a person of interest in the case, Tyrone Morman, who was arrested for giving false information to law enforcement after lying to police.
A detective spoke with Morman, who claimed that he never had any contact with Ebersole, and also wasn’t in town when she disappeared. Witnesses reportedly refuted both of these claims.
After the detective obtained a search warrant for Morman’s cell phone, Morman claimed that he had broken the phone and thrown it away.
An informant told police that Morman still had the cell phone. Deputies got another warrant to search Morman’s home to recover his phone, prompting Morman to eventually turn the phone over to police.
While looking through the phone, detectives found information suggesting that Morman and Ebersole were together in Northwest Marion County when she disappeared on the early morning of March 3rd, 2023.
According to police, Morman remains a person of interest in Sara Ebersole’s disappearance, and detectives say he will no longer speak with them.
Despite this, her family is skeptical about his status as a person of interest. A search of Sara’s home reportedly turned up the shoes she was wearing the night she went missing. Her cigarettes and lighter were out on the porch but there were no dirty clothes anywhere, as if she changed.
Her toothbrush, hairbrush and makeup brushes were reportedly missing. So were a binder of documents regarding her ex, Joseph Mayton, along with a teddy bear with “Dahlia” text on it from when her daughter was born.
Also reportedly missing was legal paperwork that Sara kept in a manila envelope documenting that her daughter had her name changed from Dahlia Marie Vann to Cora Dhalia Mayton.
There did not appear to be any signs of a struggle. Anyone with information about Sara’s disappearance is asked to call the Marion County Sheriff’s Office at (352) 368-3508.
Hope Sarah is found. Terrifying that these kind of things keep happening, even though there’s GPS on almost every phone, countless app’s that track location and cameras everywhere. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to see who was around at the time her phone stopped working.