A 17-year-old girl has been missing from a Land O' Lakes neighborhood since last night, and Pasco County deputies are asking the public for help finding her. Ceriah Stanley was last seen around 9:50 p.m. in the Everhart Drive area, wearing a white tank top, light blue pajama pants, a pink bonnet, and white pig slippers.
According to the Pasco Sheriff's Office, Stanley is described as 5 feet 4 inches tall, weighing around 200 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair. The agency, based in west central Florida, is treating her as a missing or runaway teen and is asking anyone with information about her whereabouts to come forward. Deputies have not indicated whether they believe she remains in the immediate Land O' Lakes area.
Pasco Sheriff's deputies are currently searching for Ceriah Stanley, a missing/runaway 17-year-old. Stanley is 5'4", around 200 lbs., with brown eyes, and black hair. Stanley was last seen on Aug. 5, around 9:50 p.m., in the Everhart Dr. area of Land O'Lakes. Stanley was last… pic.twitter.com/LDMEkQ9AF3
— Pasco Sheriff (@PascoSheriff) August 6, 2026
Everhart Drive sits within the Sable Ridge subdivision off Collier Parkway near State Road 54, according to property records. The quiet residential stretch falls within the Pasco County Public Schools attendance zones for Pine View Elementary, Pine View Middle, and Land O' Lakes High School, the same records show, meaning neighbors, classmates, and educators nearby may be among those best positioned to spot her.
How to Report a Sighting
The Pasco Sheriff's Office is accepting tips online at PascoSheriff.com/tips, and community members can also call the agency's non-emergency dispatch line at 727-847-8102, option 7, to reach investigators directly. Anyone who has seen Stanley or knows where she might be is urged to reach out through either channel as soon as possible.
Why Deputies Move Fast on Runaway Reports
Florida law leaves no room for delay in cases like this. Under Florida Statute 937.021, law enforcement agencies must accept missing child reports immediately, without any waiting period, notify all on-duty officers, and enter the report into state and national missing person databases. That requirement dispels a common myth that families are supposed to wait 24 hours before reporting a missing child.
Florida agencies entered more than 29,000 missing children reports into state databases in 2023, placing the state among the busiest in the country for missing youth cases alongside California and Texas, per data cited by the National Center for Missing Children. Nationally, the picture for teens like Stanley is more encouraging than many assume: 2023 figures from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children show endangered runaways made up 93% of missing child cases the organization handled, with 74% of those runaways between 15 and 17 years old, and 48% recovered within their first week away. More recent operational data from the same organization found that 90% of missing child cases it assisted with in 2025 ended in safe recoveries.
What Happens If She's Found
Should Stanley be located, Florida law would steer her case away from juvenile detention. Under the state's Children in Need of Services framework, laid out in Florida Statutes Chapter 984, runaway minors cannot be held in secure detention and are instead directed toward family mediation and community-based diversion programs, according to research compiled by the LSU School of Public Health. Advocacy groups still stress urgency in recovering runaways quickly, noting that an estimated 1 in 6 endangered runaways nationally become potential targets of child sex trafficking while away from home, per figures cited by Gitnux.
It remains unclear whether Florida's Missing Child Alert system, which the Florida Department of Law Enforcement can activate when a child is believed to be in life-threatening danger even without direct evidence of abduction, will come into play in Stanley's case. That statewide alert mechanism operates separately from routine Sheriff's Office runaway bulletins, and no additional risk factors have been publicly identified so far.
Stanley's disappearance is the latest in a string of missing teen cases the Pasco Sheriff's Office has publicized in the Land O' Lakes area in recent months, including searches for teens Lanasia Taylor and Zoey Northrup. Deputies continue to ask anyone with information on Stanley's location to submit a tip online or call the non-emergency line.
