Pasco Sheriff's deputies are searching for 16-year-old Mitoni Harris, who was last seen around 10 p.m. Monday in the Salisbury Drive area of Holiday. Harris is described as 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighing around 130 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes, and was last seen wearing a light-colored shirt and shorts while carrying a backpack.
The Pasco Sheriff posted the search alert identifying Harris as a missing and runaway teen, and the office is asking anyone with information about the teen's whereabouts to come forward. Holiday, the unincorporated community where Harris was last seen, sits along the US Highway 19 corridor in southwestern Pasco County near the Pinellas County line and had a population of just under 25,000 as of the 2020 census, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It remains unclear whether Harris may have traveled along that corridor or in another direction, and deputies have not indicated whether specialized search teams have been deployed in this particular case.
Pasco Sheriff's deputies are currently searching for Mitoni Harris, a missing/runaway 16-year-old. Harris is 5’3”, around 130 lbs., with black hair, and brown eyes. Harris was last seen on Aug. 31, around 10 p.m., in the Salisbury Dr. area of Holiday. Harris was last seen wearing… pic.twitter.com/id8COqIDsj
— Pasco Sheriff (@PascoSheriff) September 3, 2026
How to Report a Tip
The Pasco Sheriff's Office is directing anyone with information to call its non-emergency line at 727-847-8102, option 7, or to submit tips online at pascosheriff.com/tips. The agency has steered the public toward those two channels rather than social media replies since 2022, when it disabled comments on its public posts specifically to keep time-sensitive leads on missing people from getting lost in online comment threads, per reporting at the time from the Tampa Bay Times.
Legal Mandate Behind the Search
Florida law treats every missing report involving someone under 18 as both a missing child and a missing endangered person, regardless of whether investigators suspect the teen left voluntarily. Under Florida Statute § 937.0201, that classification obligates law enforcement to deploy full search protocols rather than waiting to see if a teen returns on their own, according to the text of the statute published on Online Sunshine. A companion statute, Florida Statute § 937.021, bars agencies from imposing any mandatory waiting period before accepting a missing child report and requires the case to be entered into state and national law enforcement databases within two hours of receipt.
To manage the volume of these cases, the Pasco Sheriff's Office maintains a Missing and Abducted Child Team certified through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's Missing Kids Readiness Program. That unit, described in the agency's own release announcing the certification, deploys dedicated detectives, intelligence analysts, aerial drone and helicopter crews, and K-9 tracking units during active juvenile searches. The sheriff's office has separately noted that missing person calls rank among the most frequent types of calls for service it handles countywide, prompting the specialized protocols.
A Pattern Across Pasco County
Harris's case is the latest in a string of missing-teen alerts issued by Pasco deputies in recent weeks, including searches for Spring Hill's Lizarenee Robertson and Wesley Chapel's Cameron Jinks and Julian Shepherd, all reported missing within the same week. Not every recent case has ended in tragedy; 15-year-old Jaeda Benitez-Laboy was found safe in Land O' Lakes after a seven-week search, and Wesley Chapel teen Dakota Rubel turned up safe after being missing for roughly a week. Nationally, runaway cases made up 92 percent of the 32,167 missing-child cases the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children supported in 2025, with an overall recovery rate above 90 percent, according to the organization's published impact data.
State authorities have also ramped up coordinated recovery efforts this year. In August, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and 13 county sheriffs' offices, including Pasco County, completed a five-day joint operation called Operation Statewide Shield that recovered 163 missing children statewide, the Office of the Florida Attorney General announced. Florida's Missing Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse, created within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 1983 as the nation's first statewide clearinghouse of its kind, continues to serve as the central hub coordinating these searches across county lines. As of now, Harris's whereabouts remain unknown, and the Pasco Sheriff's Office is continuing to ask the public for any information that could help bring the teen home.
