Twelve-year-old Lorie Paige vanished from her father’s home in Tallahassee, Florida, in early June 2023. For nearly two years, her family and the community held onto hope that the shy, quiet girl who loved Roblox had simply run away to escape a broken home. That hope crumbled in April 2025, when investigators announced they had found her remains in thick brush in Thomas County, Georgia, and arrested her father, 36-year-old Andrew Wy, charging him with second-degree murder. The truth, it turns out, had been buried almost two years before anyone found the body.
Lorie Analise Paige was born on April 14, 2011, to 22-year-old Andrew Wy and 17-year-old Miranda White. According to her grandmother, Brooklyn Paige, Lorie was exceptionally bright and self-sufficient. She could read by age four and never gave anyone trouble. Friends described her as extremely shy, but she would open up about the things she loved: Roblox and trending YouTube videos.
Brooklyn claimed Lorie’s parents were never a real couple. She said Miranda wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but at six months, it was too late. By Brooklyn’s account, Miranda never truly cared for her daughter. She relocated to Tampa shortly after Lorie was born, spending her nights out partying instead of being home with her baby.
Brooklyn said she moved to Tampa to help take care of Lorie, and was appalled when she learned Miranda would sleep through most of the day, leaving food on a low shelf for Lorie to eat whenever she was hungry. Friends and family said the two never really bonded. While Lorie was cared for by relatives, including her godmother Daisy Garcia, Miranda was largely absent. Andrew claimed his relationship with Miranda was contentious from the day Lorie was born.
He maintained communication while Lorie was still a baby, but after that, Miranda packed up and moved states without telling him, ending all contact between the parents for years. Most of Lorie’s life was spent in Nashville, Tennessee. At some point, CPS removed her from Miranda’s care and placed her with her great-grandfather for a short period. Eventually, she was returned to her mother, who by then had started dating a woman named Latana White.
In Nashville, Lorie changed schools multiple times because Miranda frequently relocated for work. According to the Nashville Youth Services and Runaway Bureau, Lorie ran away from home at least once while in her mother’s care, but quickly returned. Allegedly, she had an explosive fight with Miranda and decided to leave. In 2021, Andrew reestablished communication with Lorie.
Custody was split 50/50, but with Andrew living in Tallahassee, Lorie would only visit him over summer break. During the summer of 2022, Miranda called to inform Lorie she would not be coming to pick her up again. According to Miranda, she could barely afford rent and didn’t have a stable living situation for her daughter. She claimed it was in Lorie’s best interests to stay with her father.
Lorie was unhappy with the move. While she might not have had the best relationship with her mother, she had a circle of friends and family in Nashville she wasn’t willing to leave behind. Andrew enrolled Lorie in Griffin Middle School for the 2022–23 school year and promised she’d make new friends in Tallahassee. She didn’t make many.
She remained shy and never wanted to take part in extracurricular activities. One classmate claimed it was almost impossible to keep in contact with her after school because she would self-isolate. Another student said Lorie didn’t have social media and was not allowed to use a cell phone. Andrew stated he had given Lorie a cell phone for a few months but confiscated it when her grades started dropping.
He claimed she was watching inappropriate content online. He said she would spend time by herself all day, watching television or playing Roblox on his laptop. Lorie remained in contact with her mother while living with her father, mostly via email on a school computer. Miranda claimed Andrew wouldn’t accept her calls or let Lorie speak to her on the phone.
Andrew claimed Miranda was being irresponsible and wouldn’t give him Lorie’s social security number. Miranda was also apprehensive about the time Lorie spent with her grandmother, Brooklyn. According to text messages shared by Lorie’s godmother Daisy, Miranda claimed Brooklyn was an unsafe adult and could not be trusted around her child. Miranda accused Brooklyn of bringing home dates and expecting Lorie to date them too.
Daisy pressed for specifics, but Miranda wouldn’t budge. In May 2023, Andrew claimed Lorie had a particularly distressing meeting with her mother. He believed Lorie might do something harmful and wanted to cut Miranda out of their lives forever. Miranda rebuffed the claim, stating there was nothing out of the ordinary during her conversation with her daughter.
As the school year came to a close, Lorie’s teachers started noticing red flags. A teacher named Nathan George reported her behavior to the school counselor after she gave him a note asking if he liked her. He also claimed Lorie would randomly hug him, and that she was unable to regulate her emotions, often crying in the middle of the school day. When confronted by the school counselor, Lorie denied everything and claimed the note didn’t exist.
On one occasion, Lorie began throwing items across the classroom in a fit of unprovoked rage, prompting a visit from Lisa Britt, a counselor from the school board. Lisa conducted an interview with Lorie, including a personality test, and concluded the girl was likely suffering from depression and had feelings of inadequacy. People began to question what was going on in Lorie’s personal life. A student claimed Lorie mentioned that the situation at home with her father had grown violent and volatile.
On one occasion, Andrew allegedly whooped Lorie for falling behind in her grades. On another, he approached her at the school bus stop with a belt in his hand. The student claimed they didn’t witness the whole event or hear what Andrew said. But Lorie told her friends toward the middle of the school year that she was being mistreated at home.
Andrew’s brother, Antoine Wy, claimed Andrew could be a strict parent but cared deeply for his daughter and wanted the best for her. He also claimed Lorie would stay with him and his family on occasion, and that he observed her watching inappropriate content on the internet a few times. In May 2023, Lorie ran away from home after a particularly bad fight with her father. She was located later that same day.
She ran toward a friend’s home after the argument, stayed there a while, and then went to school. Andrew claimed he texted Miranda while their daughter was missing, and she replied, “While your daughter’s gone, call me when you hear anything. ”
On June 3, 2023, Tallahassee police officer Caleb Babbs was dispatched to 1229 Continental Court after receiving a 911 call from Andrew. He reported he left for work at 11 p.
m. the previous day, and when he returned home the following day, Lorie wasn’t there. He told the officer that when he left, Lorie was watching TV. He also claimed they’d spent the whole day together.
Officer Babbs asked about inconsistencies in Lorie’s behavior leading up to the incident. Andrew told him about the time she’d run away, as well as the distressing meeting with her mother. He claimed the meeting with Miranda was the trigger that started a chain of events in which Lorie was noticeably distracted and withdrawn in the days leading up to her disappearance. The police immediately began canvassing the area, visiting her school, and interviewing friends and family members.
Margaret Summers, a paraprofessional at Griffin Middle School, tried to get the word out about her student. “I feel like after 14 days, there has to be at least one adult who has seen her or has an idea where she may have gone,” she said. Lorie was considered a missing runaway, last seen on June 3 near the 1200 block of Continental Court, close to Ocala Road and less than a mile from Mission San Luis. Pastor Rudy Ferguson of New Birth Tabernacle of Praise in Griffin Heights didn’t know Lorie personally, but he said in his position, it was important to help the community any way he could.
“We ought to be her family. We ought to look for her consistently until she’s safe and sound,” he said. Summer said Lorie had run away before but had always been found within a few days. “I’m hoping that if nothing else, Lorie will come to the school.
She knows she’s safe there. She knows that people care about her there. ”
Brooklyn claimed Lorie might have run away to live with a man named Maurice Jones, the only man her mother had dated that she’d ever liked. Miranda and Latana claimed Lorie didn’t establish contact with them at all.
A neighbor of Andrew’s claimed he didn’t see anything suspicious in the days leading up to her disappearance, or the morning of it. Students at Griffin Middle School claimed they had heard rumors that Lorie had been killed and her body could be found at the airport. In August 2023, just a few months into her disappearance, Miranda posted a cryptic message on Facebook. It read, “My baby is gone,” with a broken heart emoji.
She quickly removed it. Detectives questioned her. She claimed she meant that Lorie was not with her, but that somewhere in her heart, she knew her daughter was already dead. Although Andrew complied with the police and allowed bioluminescent testing of his residence, he was still treated as a suspect.
Investigators found it odd that he appeared unmoved when they told him Lorie might have been killed. They claimed that despite his daughter having been missing for several months, Andrew didn’t seem too bothered. Miranda wasn’t much help either. She reportedly refused buccal swab testing three times before complying.
The only reason investigators ruled her out was because her cell phone records established she was in the Nashville area when Lorie disappeared. Meanwhile, cracks began appearing in Andrew’s retelling of the sequence of events that night. Police uncovered that Andrew had called into work sick on May 27 and May 29. The geo data from his phone showed he traveled as far as Jacksonville, Florida, around the time Lorie disappeared.
In February 2024, nearly a year into Lorie’s disappearance, Andrew was called into the Tallahassee Police Department for an interview. When he didn’t show up and wasn’t responding to calls, Brooklyn was contacted. She told police Andrew appeared anxious a few days before the interview. He was also infuriated at the suggestion he might have had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance.
Later that same day, Andrew reached out to police, saying he would come to the station, but only with his lawyer present. In the interview, investigators asked him more direct questions. They asked if he had ever disciplined Lorie. He said he had, but only when it was deemed necessary.
They asked him to name any of her friends. He couldn’t. They asked why geo data from his phone placed him at Jacksonville International Airport around the time of her disappearance. Andrew claimed he went there to drop off a friend named Tim Brown.
When asked for Tim’s phone number, Andrew said he didn’t have it on him. He seemed agitated when pressed for more information. Police were never able to get any information from Andrew about Tim Brown. They even invited his brother Antoine to the police department, who claimed he had never heard that name before.
Still, he believed Andrew would never harm his daughter. He believed Lorie was alive somewhere and had run away while Andrew was at work. He believed she was unhappy with how strict her father was and had a pattern of running away when things got hard. Brooklyn also stood in support of Andrew, claiming if there was one thing she knew for certain, it was that he would never hurt his daughter.
Simone Robinson, Andrew’s girlfriend at the time, had been away in Louisiana for military training. She claimed she first heard of Lorie’s disappearance in mid-June when she was given phone access again. When questioned about Tim Brown, she claimed Andrew did have a friend named Tim. This was eventually revealed to be a man named Tim Costine, who claimed he had never flown out of Jacksonville International Airport.
It was also revealed there were old cell phones and laptops in the home, which Lorie would sometimes use to play Roblox. Police asked Andrew to surrender those devices. He refused. Eventually, they turned up at his house with a probable cause search warrant and seized both devices and his Dodge Charger.
Andrew was reportedly laughing and making jokes before getting into a coworker’s car while the police were at his home. When bioluminescent tests were conducted on the Dodge Charger, traces of blood were found around the front passenger seat and front passenger window. The smoking gun came a few days later, in March 2024, when investigators retrieved information from Andrew’s devices that showed he’d made contact with an online travel agency. He purchased a one-way ticket to San Juan, Puerto Rico on June 2, 2023.
He then traveled to Jacksonville where he retrieved the ticket, but he never made his flight and asked for a refund, which was denied. Police also found it strange that within a few months of Lorie’s disappearance, Andrew had moved homes and changed his cell phone number. They couldn’t get a direct answer on what he did on the two days he called in sick from work. Andrew had also applied for a passport around the same time, despite not needing one to travel to Puerto Rico.
What made investigators even more suspicious was that on the day of his scheduled flight, he called 911 to report his daughter missing. Police asked Brooklyn to call Andrew with them present. Investigators claimed that while Lorie’s grandmother repeatedly tried to direct the conversation toward the missing girl, Andrew would veer off and talk about his mental health struggles. Brooklyn told him she wanted to decorate Lorie’s bedroom in remembrance of her upcoming birthday.
Andrew ignored the statement and went off on a tangent about how infuriated he was that police were treating him as a suspect. Police also tracked Andrew’s credit card usage to a pharmacy where he was believed to have purchased contraceptives in late May 2023. His girlfriend Simone was in Louisiana for military training, and he did not disclose information about any other women he was seeing at the same time. Later that same month, police extracted information from an older iPhone retrieved from Andrew’s home during the February 2024 seizure.
The phone, along with other devices, had been factory reset. However, experts pulled up data from the iPhone that included searches for “bad neighborhood Tallahassee, Florida” and “Apalachicola National Forest dead body. ” During the search, the device had viewed a Quora page on which a user asked, “Why would police stop looking for a missing child, saying the delay of the search is based on where they are in the investigation? Wouldn’t they still need to find the child?
”
Geodata from the same phone showed Andrew had traveled to Thomas County, Georgia, in the early hours of June 1, 2023. Police traveled to the area and conducted searches across the area, including on private residences. On April 5, 2025, the remains of a young woman were discovered in thick brush near where Andrew’s cell phone had shown his location. Several bones of the same skeleton were submitted for DNA comparison.
On April 11, the results indicated the remains were indeed Lorie’s. Investigators had enough evidence to arrest Andrew later that same day, concluding a 22-month-long investigation. He was formally charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of his daughter. According to investigators, Lorie’s murder was intentional but not premeditated.
They believed Andrew had gone into a fit of rage and attacked his daughter. State Attorney Jack Campbell claimed Andrew had killed Lorie on June 1, 2023, just a few days before calling 911 to report her missing. The state attorney’s office believed Andrew had sexually assaulted his 12-year-old daughter and killed her after impregnating her. They believed he murdered the young girl and then buried her remains in Georgia the next day.
Campbell also revealed Andrew was being treated for an STD around the time Lorie disappeared. He claimed Andrew had gone in for treatment for a venereal disease but would not allow doctors to examine him. This raised suspicion and led several investigators to believe he was looking to get medication to treat someone else. “Unfortunately, we deal every year with people who do impregnate children, and even their own children,” Campbell said.
“If he had gotten her pregnant, if he had given her a venereal disease, those would be hard things to explain. Is there somebody who I feel is responsible for not catching it? No. No one else other than Andrew Wy was responsible for what happened to Lorie Paige.
”
According to Tallahassee police chief Lawrence Revell, the truth started coming together when they revisited Andrew and asked him to retell the story. He said, “People that are telling the truth typically don’t have problems retelling the truth,” adding, “People who are telling lies really have a hard time keeping all of those straight. ”
“First and foremost, thank you for being here,” Revell said at a press conference. “Today is not a happy day.
Today’s a sad day in the sense that we did recover the remains of missing 12-year-old Lorie Paige. I told you two years ago we would never give up. I told you two years ago we would find Lorie and we would bring her home. I told you two years ago that we would find who did this and we would arrest them and bring them to justice.
And today I stand before you to tell you we have done just that. ”
Since Lorie’s disappearance in June 2023, detectives pursued hundreds of leads, conducted interviews across multiple states, examined digital evidence, and searched extensively across North Florida and South Georgia. The case evolved significantly over time with key developments ultimately leading to Wy’s arrest. June 3, 2023: Lorie Paige is reported missing by her father.
He claims she left home with her backpack sometime in the night while he was at work. Summer of 2023 to early 2024: Detectives pursue hundreds of leads across state lines. Lorie is never located, and the story provided by Wy begins to show inconsistencies. February 2, 2024: A phone is seized from Wy’s residence.
A forensic analysis uncovers questionable internet searches, including queries about remote areas with bodies of water in Alabama and Georgia. March 2024: As more inconsistencies in Wy’s statements are identified and new information about his relationship with Lorie emerges, detectives shift their focus more heavily toward Wy. Early 2024: Based on digital evidence, detectives begin searching a remote brush-covered area of Thomas County, Georgia, known locally as a plantation. Multiple searches yield no results.
April 5, 2025: Following a prescribed burn that cleared heavy brush in the area, detectives return to the plantation for another search. They locate human remains. The remains are processed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and positively identified as those of Lorie Paige. Andrew maintained his innocence, claiming the police had the wrong guy and that he would never have done anything to harm his own daughter.
His brother Antoine set up a GoFundMe shortly after he was arrested. While the fundraiser was taken down because the platform doesn’t condone raising funds for the defense of violent crimes, the original post sought to raise over $100,000 to uncover the untruths made by the Tallahassee Police Department and bring the real person responsible for Lorie’s murder to justice. On June 20, 2025, two years after Lorie’s disappearance, Andrew passed away at 5:36 p. m.
while in holding. According to the coroner’s report, he died of a pulmonary embolism brought on by natural causes. The Mayo Clinic defines a pulmonary embolism as a blood clot that blocks and stops blood flow to an artery in the lung. The Leon County Sheriff’s Office confirmed his death.
Staff moved Wy to their medical unit and attempted life-saving measures. The 36-year-old died a little after 5:30 that evening. Because he died before conviction, the court cannot officially declare guilt. Lorie’s family will be left without the closure of a full legal proceeding.
Authorities indicated that unless new evidence emerges implicating another party, the case will remain inactive. Many community members felt a mix of sorrow and relief at the news of the arrest after nearly two years of uncertainty and grief. A candlelight vigil and bubble-blowing ceremony were held at the Amphitheater in Tallahassee in remembrance of Lorie shortly after police found her remains. The crowd received candles and bubbles as the song “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson played in the background.
The event concluded with a moment of silence. Margaret Summers, the staff member at Griffin Middle School who had spoken with Andrew during the investigation, described the arrest as a sobering conclusion to a painful case. “It’s a dark ending to a dark, twisted tale. It’s had multiple shocking revelations.
This is just the last one. ”
Margaret claimed she had met with Andrew during the search process and later reflected that his behavior had seemed off, even when she was offering him comfort. “I think that at the beginning, she was thought to be a runaway, and I think that initially based on that, the ball was dropped,” she said. “But once TPD picked up the ball, they ran with it, and they ran with that ball all the way to the woods in Georgia.
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Pastor Rudy Ferguson, who helped coordinate searches and awareness efforts, expressed mixed feelings. “The way she was found ought to be in our memories for the rest of our lives,” he said. “It’s also my way of healing as well, because we have been looking for a long time. And even though we got the news that we didn’t hope for, we got the answer that started the process of closure.
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