A 15-year-old girl from the Atascocita area has been missing since the early morning hours of Sunday, and investigators now believe she may be nearly 60 miles away in Hempstead, possibly in the company of an unknown man who goes by Miguel or the nickname Junior. Carina Ramos was last seen around 1:30 a.m. in the 19900 block of Firesign Drive, wearing a black crop top, black flared leggings and pink Hello Kitty Crocs, and carrying a black JanSport backpack.
The Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office, led by Constable Mark Herman, shared the appeal on Facebook Friday night, asking the public to help locate the teenager and to contact the office immediately with any information about her whereabouts. Ramos is described as about 5 feet 1 inch tall and roughly 114 pounds. Investigators believe she may currently be in the Hempstead area of Waller County, a stretch of unincorporated Greater Houston roughly 55 to 60 miles from where she was last seen, according to distance data from ViaMichelin.
Constable Herman's office asked the public to share the post widely, a common tactic for cases that fall short of the strict legal threshold for a statewide AMBER Alert. Under Texas law, an AMBER Alert requires verified evidence of an abduction and immediate danger of serious bodily harm or death, according to FindLaw. Without that evidence, agencies like Precinct 4 rely instead on entering the case into the National Crime Information Center database, along with public bulletins, social media outreach and their own mobile alert tools.
How Deputies Are Getting the Word Out
Precinct 4 maintains a proprietary C4 NOW mobile app, in addition to Facebook and Instagram, to push live crime, traffic and missing-person alerts directly to residents across its territory. The office is the largest constable agency in the nation, employing more than 670 sworn personnel who serve over 1.2 million residents across unincorporated Harris County communities including Spring, Tomball, Cypress and Humble. Anyone with information about Ramos is asked to contact the office directly.
If Ramos is being sheltered by an adult without her parents' knowledge, that person could face criminal exposure. Texas Penal Code § 25.06 makes it a Class A misdemeanor to knowingly harbor or shelter a runaway child under 18 without notifying law enforcement or the child's parent within 24 hours, an offense punishable by up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine, per FindLaw. Precinct 4 has pursued exactly that kind of charge before: in January 2024, deputies arrested an adult man on Northwest Freeway after finding a missing underage runaway asleep in his vehicle, as Hoodline reported at the time.
A Heavy Caseload for Regional Investigators
Ramos's disappearance adds to what is already a significant caseload for juvenile investigators across the region. Harris County alone logged 6,357 new missing child reports in 2025, out of 28,229 total juvenile missing person entries recorded statewide, according to the Texas Center for the Missing. That means the county accounts for more than one in five missing child reports filed anywhere in Texas each year. The same organization's data shows that runaways make up roughly 80 to 85 percent of all missing child reports across the 14-county Houston-Galveston region, though officials stress that a runaway classification does not make a missing teenager any less vulnerable.
The Texas Department of Public Safety's Missing Persons Clearinghouse, established by the state legislature in 1985, serves as the central repository coordinating missing-minor records and cross-jurisdictional intelligence across all 254 Texas counties — infrastructure that becomes relevant as Harris County investigators follow leads west into Waller County. Ramos's case is one of several recent Precinct 4 searches for missing teenage girls in the area; Hoodline previously covered the search for 16-year-old Skye Meiler in Gleannloch last year and a January 2024 search for a missing 14-year-old in nearby Humble.
As of Friday night's appeal, no arrests have been announced and Carina Ramos's exact location remained unconfirmed. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office immediately.
