The two-year-old was taken from a bowling alley in Tacoma, Washington on January 23, 1999.
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Teekah Lewis’s Disappearance from Tacoma, Washington, haunts family 26 years later
January 23, 1999.
The New Frontier Bowling Alley was full that night. Couples on dates, kids with their friends, and families gathered for a fun night out.
Theresa Czapiewski was there, too. She had come with a large group — some family, friends, her boyfriend, and two of her daughters.
“It was my turn to bowl. I told my brother and my boyfriend at the time, ‘Make sure you watch my Teekah,’” Theresa told Dateline.
The 2-year-old Teekah was playing games in the bowling alley’s arcade when her mother was up to bowl.
When Theresa’s turn was over, “I turned around and asked them where my Teekah was,” she recalled.
Theresa was told that Teekah was still playing games in the arcade. The area was full of people -- surely one of them had to be her.
“I said, ‘No, no she’s not. ‘Where’s my baby?’”
Teekah was gone.
TEEKAH LEWIS
For a parent, those first couple years of a child’s life are special. The first steps, the first giggles, the first-time hearing them say, “Momma.”
Theresa experienced that warm feeling with five children, all girls. Teekah was her fourth.
“That little girl was a Momma’s girl,” Theresa said. “If I had to go to the store, she would cry. She was my everything.”
Theresa raised her girls in Tacoma, Washington, where the streets felt safe. “I would let my daughters play outside and, of course, I’d be watching them,” she said. “But it took a turn in ‘99.’”
January 23, 1999, to be exact.
The day started out like any normal Saturday, Theresa said. “My boyfriend at the time was in the military. He had a cousin on Fort Lewis, so we went there,” she recalled. “On the way back, we stopped at Taco Bell.”
At the time, Teekah’s father was incarcerated so Theresa was raising her daughters alone
That evening, Theresa took her twin daughters to their godmother’s house. “They liked to go over there because their god sister was their age,” Theresa said. She then dropped off another one of her daughters at her uncle’s house. “And they watched her while we went bowling that night.”
Theresa said she decided to take her youngest two to the bowling alley with her because she knew they would be a handful for someone else to look after. “So I took Teekah and Tamika with me,” she explained. “I put Teekah in white sweats, a green Tweety Bird shirt, and her Jordans, and she had a jacket on — and she got a purse.”
At around 8:00 p.m., they headed to the bowling alley with Theresa’s brother, boyfriend, and other family and friends. “That’s when the nightmare began,” Theresa said.
THE DISAPPEARANCE
The New Frontier Bowling Alley in Tacoma, Washington was packed. “It was a pretty good crowd and there was other kids there,” Theresa recalled.
Theresa says Teekah immediately noticed the games in the bowling alley’s arcade and wanted to play. “My brother gave her some change and she was, you know, putting her pennies in the machine but it was just coming back out, and she didn’t know that.”
Teekah found a car game she liked and pretended to drive while Theresa kept an eye on her. Then, it was Theresa’s turn to bowl.
When Theresa’s turn was over, she asked her brother and boyfriend where Teekah was. They assumed she was playing games in the crowded arcade and they just couldn’t see her. She was small, after all. “I said, ‘Well, maybe she’s in between the video game,’” Theresa remembered. “No, she wasn’t.”
Panic set in. “I looked in the bathroom, she wasn’t in there. I immediately went down to the other end of the bowling alley where there was another bathroom,” Theresa said. “My sister-in-law was in there with her baby, and I asked her, ‘Is Teekah in there?’ She said, ‘No, she didn’t come with me.’”
Theresa says she ran up to the bowling alley’s security officer and told him her daughter was missing. “He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘She’s nowhere. I searched everywhere. She’s gone.’”
According to Theresa, the officer made an announcement on the intercom and eventually called for police backup.
“Backup came. I had my boyfriend at the time sit with my daughter, my baby Tamika, she was 10 months old at the time. She was in her car seat asleep,” Theresa said. “I went outside, and I was yelling for Teekah and I was talking to the officer.”
That’s when Theresa says something strange happened. “I’m outside with the police and my sister-in-law ran to me and said, “Theresa, that woman has your baby.” But it wasn’t Teekah she was talking about.
According to Theresa, earlier in the night, a woman who was with a group of men, was sitting next to them in the bowling alley asking to hold babies. “My brother let her hold his son, but they were right there watching her and then she gave him back,” she said. “She wanted him again. My brother said no because he thought it was odd.”
It was the same woman who reportedly had Theresa’s youngest, Tamika. “I was like, ‘What?’ [My sister-in-law] said, ‘She has her in her car,’” Theresa recalled.
Theresa told Dateline she ran up to the woman’s car and saw Tamika buckled into the seat, the woman ready to drive off. “I said, ‘You got my daughter,’” Theresa said. “She said, ‘This ain’t your baby.’”
Theresa told Dateline she doesn’t know how the woman got her baby but she called over police officer who arrested the woman and gave Tamika back to her.
But Teekah was still missing.
Officers from around the state came to assist with the search. “There was so many police officers. They came from everywhere,” Theresa said. “We’re talking Lakewood, Pierce County Sheriff’s. We’re talking about Fife.”
But the case belonged to the Tacoma Police Department. “The bowling alley was searched, the parking lot was shut down, the vehicles were searched, trunks were searched,” Sergeant Julie Deir of the Tacoma Police Department told Dateline. “That whole area was scoured with dogs, with people on foot.”
Sergeant Deir told Dateline she believes the woman was spoken to at the time. “Initially, at the scene, she made, apparently, some suicidal threats when she was detained after the baby was taken from her,” she said. “I believe they talked to her at the time, but I haven’t found the report.”
Days passed, then weeks. Still no sign of Teekah.
“I’ll never forget that day — never,” Theresa told Dateline. “They took my everything from me. They took a piece of my heart.”
THE INVESTIGATION
Theresa Czapiewski had to let her daughters know their baby sister wasn’t coming home. “I said, um, ‘Your sister was kidnapped,’” Theresa recalled. “They didn’t understand.”
The family passed out fliers, did news interviews, anything they could to try and bring Teekah home.
Shortly after Teekah’s disappearance, another family came forward with a chilling story. “These parents came forward and said, ‘Hey, this is what happened to us.’”
Just two months before Teekah’s disappearance, a 4-year-old boy allegedly had been sexually assaulted in that same bowling alley’s bathroom. The man was never caught. “That was looked into, but with there being zero eyewitnesses to what actually happened, there was no connection made,” Sgt. Deir told Dateline.
And on the same night of Teekah’s disappearance, there was another reported incident. A man was seen fleeing a local park in a Pontiac Grand AM after trying to kidnap children there. Deir confirmed the incident but said, “there was nothing concrete” that could link Teekah’s kidnapping to that case.
But that Pontiac was an important detail. Theresa told Dateline a witness said on the same day Teekah disappeared, a Pontiac Grand AM was seen speeding away from the bowling alley. “[The witness] said she was driving into the bowling alley and it almost hit her,” Theresa recalled. Sergeant Deir confirmed that report. “She described it to be almost a plum-colored Pontiac,” she said.
Since she began investigating the case about five years ago, Sgt. Deir has done a lot of digging into that car. “There was some allegations that somebody had obtained a [Pontiac] that might have had stains in the back,” she told Dateline. “I contacted those people, and they didn’t remember anything about any stains in the car and the car has since been destroyed.”
While the sergeant didn’t find the car, she did find a lead. “We did have a suspect of sorts which was discovered by way of looking at all the calls that came into 911 that night,” she said. Apparently, one of the calls that came into 911 the night Teekah disappeared was from a concerned mother. “This lady had called and said that her son had made some weird statements about wanting to leave [town] and [asking], ‘Would she leave with him?’” Deir told Dateline. The woman asked officers to perform a welfare check on her son, who was in his 40s, at his residence. “He had some interesting history that was sexual in nature.”
Deir pulled up a picture of him. She said he matched the description of someone at the bowling alley that night. “I think a mother and son had seen an individual walking through the bowling alley holding a little girl’s hand. The individual they had seen had been a white male with longish hair with a very pockmarked face,” Deir said. “He kind of matched the description.”
Sergeant Deir says she tracked the man down, who lived near the bowling alley at the time of Teekah’s disappearance. “He could not provide us with anything that helped or harmed his case,” she said. “He said he did have a Pontiac but it wasn’t the same Pontiac that was seen.”
A month after their initial contact with the man, Sgt. Deir says they went back to speak with him again but this time, he was deceased. “We did get his DNA just in case,” she said. “So the fact that he matched that description, the call made that night and at some point he had involvement with a Pontiac, kind of sparked our attention”
The sergeant noted the man had a history of mental health issues and that there was nothing suspicious about his death. He is considered a person of interest in Teekah’s disappearance.
Deir says she also recently paid a visit to the woman who had tried to take Tamika that night at the bowling alley. “Her mental health deteriorated so bad that it’s impossible to get anything from her,” she said. Theresa Czapiewski wishes authorities had gotten to her sooner. “There’s no questioning her, there’s no giving her a polygraph, she’s that gone,” she said.
Still, Theresa is determined to find out what happened to her daughter.
LOOKING FORWARD
The New Frontier Bowling Ally has been torn down now. But the memories of what happened there can’t be erased. “Who would want to take a child away from their family?” Theresa asks.
Theresa told Dateline it’s been a decades-long battle for her daughter’s case to get the attention it deserves. “I’m fighting for mine. I will do anything to find Teekah. Anything,” she said. “I don’t wish this on any parent. And I tell parents, ‘Keep an eye on your child because it only takes a second for your child to come up missing.’”
Three years after Teekah disappeared, Theresa had her sixth daughter. She says the way she parented after her daughter’s disappearance changed. “I didn’t want them to go to nobody’s house because I didn’t trust anybody. People think when you have a missing child, your life goes on. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I got PTSD from it. Depression, anxiety. I carry that all with me,” she said.
It has affected the way her daughters’ raise their own kids now, too. “If you have experienced a missing sibling, you’re going to be cautious,” Theresa said.
Although it’s been 26 years, Theresa says she and her daughters never forgot Teekah, and never will. “Teekah turns 29 on the 4th of July,” she said. “Every year, I’ll buy a cupcake and light it and put her picture by it and sing happy birthday to her. That was Teekah’s holiday. Christmas and her birthday.”
Sergeant Julie Deir told Dateline that she’s hopeful, one day, they’ll find out what happened to Teekah. “With every day that passes, it gets harder and harder, obviously, so we really would like to get some answers for Theresa and her family,” she said. “But it’s gonna require somebody saying something.”
Theresa lives in Virginia now, but every year she holds a vigil in Washington to celebrate Teekah’s life. She couldn’t get back to Washington this year, so she held it online. “This will be the first year I don’t have a candlelight vigil for my daughter back home,” she said.
But Theresa doesn’t need to be in Washington to honor her daughter. Teekah is always with her.
“If Teekah’s still out there, I want her to know I never gave up,” Theresa told Dateline tearfully. “I will never give up finding you. I just want you home.”
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