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Timeline: The disappearance of Maya Millete

▶ Watch Video: Searching for Maya Millete

This article was originally published on Feb. 18, 2022.

Maya Millete, 39, went missing in January 2021. What was happening between her and her husband before she disappeared and what does spellcasting have to do with it?

January 7, 2021: Maya Millete last seen

Maya Millete
Maya Millete

Maricris Drouaillet

Mother of three, Maya (May) Millete was 39 when she was last seen on surveillance video arriving at her home in Chula Vista, California.

January 8-9, 2021: Where’s Maya?

Larry Millete
Larry Millete

Maricris Drouaillet

Maya’s husband of 21 years, Larry Millete, was the last person to see Maya. When asked about Maya, he told her family different stories about where she might have gone. 

January 9, 2021: “Help Find Maya”

millete-03.jpg

Maricris Drouaillet

After not hearing from Maya for two days, her sister Maricris Drouaillet reported her missing to the Chula Vista Police Department. Family and friends made flyers to spread awareness about her disappearance. 

January 10, 2021: A worried family

Richard and Maricris Drouaillet
Richard and Maricris Drouaillet

CBS News

Maya’s older sister, Maricris and her husband Richard Drouaillet were hoping against hope that Maya was somehow OK, but they say they knew something terrible had really happened when Maya didn’t show up for her daughter’s birthday.

January 11, 2021: Extra help

Billy Little
Attorney Billy Little

CBS News

Attorney Billy Little, a former criminal defense investigator for the U.S. Navy, heard about Maya’s disappearance and wanted to help. On January 11, 2021, Little went to the Millete home and looked for clues. He says Larry Millete seemed unconcerned about his wife and it looked like he was airing out the house.

January 13, 2021: Staying hopeful

Maya and Larry Millete
Maya and Larry Millete

Maricris Drouaillet

“I love you honey, just come back home,” said Larry Millete during a phone interview with local media. “I’m still very hopeful that will (with) all this media coverage, she’ll turn up and say, ‘Hey, I’m OK.'” On that same day friends, family, and neighbors searched for Maya at Mount San Miguel Park.

January 23, 2021: Search warrant issued

The Millete home
Two weeks after Maya’s disappearance, the Chula Vista Police Department searched the Millete’s Chula Vista, California, home.

CBS News

The Chula Vista Police Department issued a search warrant at Maya and Larry Millete’s home. The goal was to obtain evidence that would lead to finding Maya. Investigators seized some of Larry’s guns.

February 5, 2021: “Bring her home”

Maya Millete press conference
Maya’s family makes a public plea for help find her.

Chula Vista Police Department/Facebook

The Chula Vista Police Department and Maya’s family held a press conference pleading for help to find Maya. “Please bring her home.” Maricris Drouailett cried. “If you have any information, please help us find my sister …”

February 2021: Dedicated search volunteers

Help Find Maya searchers
The search parties were made up of dozens of friends, family members, colleagues of Maya’s and also strangers. They began looking for her in vast desert areas east of Chula Vista, near the Arizona border. 

Help Find Maya/Instagram

Since Maya’s disappearance, a group called “Help Find Maya” has been out searching for her most weekends. The group has searched areas in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Otay Lakes and Marron Valley Road.

March 2021: Spellcasting

Millete blood altar
Larry Millete’s bloody altar

Billy Little

Billy Little says he found evidence that Larry Millete purchased spells online. According to Little, Larry first tried spells to get Maya to fall back in love with him. But as the couple’s marital problems worsened, police say, Larry eventually wanted to harm her. He later asked a spellcaster, “Please punish May and incapacitate her enough so she can’t leave the house. It’s time to take the gloves off.”

May 7, 2021: Firearms surrendered

Larry Millete's gun cache
Larry Millete was served with a gun violence restraining order and had to surrender firearms to authorities.

San Diego Superior Court

During the investigation by the Chula Vista Police Department, multiple search warrants were served at the Millete home. On May 7,2021, Larry Millete was served with a gun violence restraining order and had to surrender more firearms to authorities.

October 19, 2021: Larry Millete arrested

millete-12.jpg
In October 2021, Larry Millete was arrested for his wife’s murder. He pleaded not guilty

CBS News

Nine months after her disappearance, Larry Millete was arrested for the murder of his wife Maya. He has pleaded not guilty and continues to say she willingly left and abandoned the family. 

October 30, 2021: #TeamMaya

millete-13.jpg
Asked why she’s helping in the search for someone she doesn’t know, Keri Park tells CBS News’ Jonathan Vigliotti, “it should be a community effort … you just want closure for this family so much. … And that’s why we’re out here. It’s why we keep coming. They deserve it. … Maya deserves it.”

CBS News/Cindy Cesare

Many dedicated search volunteers like Keri Park have never met Maya. She and others drive for hours to get to the search locations and have spent days looking for Maya. “It’s just hard. I mean, you just want closure for this family so much,” Park told “48 Hours” contributor Jonathan Vigliotti. “And I just want to bring her home.”

January 7, 2022: One year later

Maya Millete missing poster
Maya Millete was last seen in January 7, 2021 in Chula Vista, California.

Maricris Drouaillet

After a year without Maya, the Help Find Maya community has created merchandise, held vigils, rallies, and raised more than $50,000 for search efforts. They put QR codes on flyers for people to scan for more information and to recruit volunteers.

Justice for Maya

Maya Millete
Maya Millete’s family and friends were adamant  that she did not leave her children voluntarily.

Maricris Drouaillet

In August 2024, a judge granted custody of Maya’s three children to her sister, Maricris.    

On July 9, 2026, a jury found Larry Millete guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Maya Millete.

Maya Millete has never been found.     

What an undergrad wants you to know about college parent Facebook groups

By CNN
My daughter saw a mouse in her dorm room — what should she do? What brand of rain boots should I buy for my student? Should I hire a private service to wash my child’s clothes, or teach them to do their own laundry?When my older brother decided where to go to college four years ago, one of my mom’s friends sent her a link to something no one in my family had ever known existed: an admitted students Facebook page. Not for the students. For the parents.It was full of posts from stressed-out parents commiserating, ranting, and asking many specific and overbearing questions: What were the specs of a certain dorm room? How can I get access to my kid’s grades? Do I need to get my child to sign something to get access to his medical records?Facebook is now home to hundreds of groups specifically for parents of college students. Most of these groups are private and have thousands of members. To join, the volunteer administrators usually require proof of a student’s admission, like screenshots or scans of an admissions letter for a page administrator to review. These pages appear to be run by parents themselves, not the colleges, and passed down from parent administrator to parent administrator as students graduate.Should I know your child hasn’t made any friends?While many posts are about more practical matters, like what appliances are allowed and the need for mattress toppers, some parents are sharing detailed posts about a student’s lack of friends, mental health and other struggles — with thousands of strangers.There are also posts from parents expressing their deep grief and sorrow about their child leaving home, and their fear that they and their kid will not be able to handle this new stage of life.“Parents are … showing videos of themselves crying, where they drop off their kids. Like, they’re showing very skewed perspectives of extremes,” said Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, a Toronto area-based psychology and education behaviorist and author. “The vast majority of what we see anyway is the fact that like, yes, there’s big feelings and yes, there’s transitions, but it’s not nearly as extreme as what’s presented in social media.”It’s true the transition from high school to college can be a taxing and scary time for students and parents, as I experienced last fall. But I think the Facebook groups, while answering some questions, overdramatize the experience of sending a kid off to college. While a few of my mom’s friends said the groups could occasionally provide helpful information, they also said it created unnecessary stress about the big change.The scary transition to independenceYoung adults living away home, without a highly structured school day with classes and extracurriculars dominating most of their time, are going to make mistakes. How could they not, with new professors, classes, friends and social expectations? Things often don’t go according to plan. That’s when some parents post about those struggles, trying to help solve the problems themselves.When parents parachute in, they’re sending a message that their child can’t learn to fix problems themselves, according to Hanley-Dafoe. “It rocks the person’s confidence and their efficacy, which is their belief that they’re able to do things,” she said. This belief is vital for a student to do well in college and the rest of their life.I giggled when my mom read out a post about a kid losing his expensive coat at a party, and his worried father asking hundreds of other parents to ask their children to check their closets to see if they accidentally took it. Then I cringed a little, because that son is a real person who might not even know his father is spreading his dirty (or in this case, lost) laundry all over the internet.As my brother told me before I went to college, a little mystery can be a good thing. There is no mystery, or even basic privacy, when your worried parents are broadcasting your lost mittens or failed midterm exam to 5,000 people on a Facebook page. College students should not have to worry about their parents embarrassing them to an audience of thousands. And I should not know about another student’s personal struggles from their parent’s post.Why are these pages so popular with parents?The transition to college, especially freshman year, can be incredibly hard for students and parents. It was for me. By all measures everything went well, yet I was still painfully homesick for my entire first year. And there wasn’t much my parents could do, especially from hundreds of miles away. But they helped in little ways, like calling me, and I found ways to mitigate my struggles myself.“If you are kind of an obsessively involved parent, it scratches that itch for you,” said Dr. Lynn Lyons, a Concord, New Hampshire-based psychotherapist, of the Facebook parent groups. “And if you are not, and you venture into that world, you can be very easily convinced that you are not doing enough, that you should be monitoring your kid, that you should be decorating her dorm room.” Lyons is the author of “The Anxiety Audit: 7 Sneaky Ways Anxiety Takes Hold and How To Escape Them.”Parents need to shift from parenting up close to parenting from afar. Some parents are just not making the necessary change, according to experts.“We’re starting to see parents who have become extremely involved in the decision-making and the critical thinking for a lot of our young adults,” Hanley-Dafoe said. “Sometimes, we’ve done our students a wee bit of a disservice by not letting them figure things out on their own.”What should parents do to help?During my move-in day last fall, parents were unceremoniously separated from their kids at 3 p.m., when the new freshman class went to a ceremony on the football field and parents were told to leave campus. I came back to my half-set-up single room and finished unpacking myself. I had no plan and no roommate to go with me to events. A day later, I left on a backpacking trip for orientation. Even though it was superhard in the moment, I’m glad I was forced to just figure things out on my own.Many parents “have a really hard time tolerating their children’s distress, and so they don’t give their child the opportunity to tolerate their distress, right?” Lyons said. “But the ability to get through tough stuff on their own is a hugely important skill. The way that you know that you will be able to handle a tough transition is because you just got through one.”Now, that’s not to say parents can’t show up and give helpful advice. My mom visited several times, for parents’ weekend or for my choral concerts. It was comforting to have set dates when I knew that I’d get to see my mom, so that when my homesickness was at its worst, I could remind myself that it was only two weeks or so until I would see her again.I also called my parents for troubleshooting and advice. They were the ones to tell me that it was a good idea to make an appointment with my adviser to select classes, to go to office hours and to not worry about finding my best friends within the first week. A lot of problems I still handled on my own, and sometimes it really sucked. But I made it through, and now I know I can do it again. Other kids can, too, without their parents interfering on Facebook groups.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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