Ayanna Krzyzanowski: A Minor, Lost?

Ayanna Krzyzanowski was 16 when she went missing on March 19, 2023. She also lived in a group home, from which she left with nothing besides the clothing on her back, according to police reports.

She is one of several juveniles listed as missing in Milwaukee, but she didn’t become a big news story. Media Milwaukee obtained the police file through an open records request. As Ayanna’s family did not respond to requests for comment, the information below comes from the police reports.

Ayanna was reported missing by a woman who works at ‘Reflections Group Home on North 23^rd Street.  At the time she was 15. She is one of two 15-year-old girls who are missing in Milwaukee, although there is no sign the cases are related.

Ayanna left with no words to anyone in the group home and is still missing more than a year later. She was reported to be angry and was unwilling to talk about why she left the group home she was living in. She received almost no media coverage and seemingly vanished into thin air. This was what the police report revealed. 

She left the group home because “she was angry and going through a crisis” although she wasn’t clear the nature of it, the reports say. She is 5 foot 3 inches tall, a Black female, 150 pounds, and was wearing a red hoodie with a skull on it and gray Victoria Secret pink pants.

She was a 10^th grader at Hamilton High School when she disappeared.

About 32,711 people have gone missing in the City of Milwaukee in the last 10 years, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. At any given time, about 500 people are actively missing in Milwaukee. Many are people of color, like Ayanna, yet very few make the news.  

In 2024 through Oct. 15, 2,466 people were reported missing in the city. Each year in the past decade, between 2,500 and 3,300 people have been reported missing. Many are short-term missing cases where people are quickly found, highlighting a crisis of online grooming, group home runaways, and other issues. Stereotypical stranger abductions are exceptionally rare, and those are the ones that tend to be highlighted in the news.

A team of 12 student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee but several from smaller Wisconsin cities. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests.  In the case of Ayanna, Milwaukee police declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full police file to Media Milwaukee. 

In April 2023, police were told by Ayanna’s adoptive mother that she had not seen her. She accused the biological mother of possibly “harboring her” based on the beliefs of Ayanna’s treatment team.

In April of that year, a former student stated she was in contact with Ayanna on Facebook messenger and learned she was allegedly staying with her biological mother, but when police contacted the mother, she stated that she had not been in contact with her daughter.

In December 2023, police received a lead on Ayanna from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from an anonymous caller.

Two classmates stated they had received messages from Ayanna on Instagram and that she was residing with a cousin on her biological mother’s side and attends Martin Luther.

Ayanna wrote that she wanted to see what was going on in the messages. Ayanna talked about running away from her adoptive mom in the past.

In December, the adoptive mom called police and stated that she has a restraining order against the child and had received a link to a TikTok video by email.

The video showed a girl lip-syncing to a song; the caption said “When you’re watching videos with your mama.”

It appeared to be of the missing girl.

Ayanna has a warrant with the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s office for disorderly conduct, the reports say.

In January, a confidential source said that Ayanna is not currently enrolled in any MPS school.

The adoptive mother was interviewed by police again in July 2024 and stated that she had Ayanna in her care since she was about 1 years old and she should not be in contact with the biological mother until she turns 21.

The MPD is still actively working on the case.

Detective Jamie Sromalla, who is the Milwaukee police detective assigned to missing person cases, conducted a follow-up on her disappearance in November 2024, according to the report.

That report says that police have had no contact with Ayanna since she was reported missing in 2023.

When the birth mother was involved in an alleged domestic violence incident, she said in the police body camera footage something along the lines of, “He’s a hater because I gotta baby that ran away from foster care!”

She added, “She comes over to see me. I am not going to turn my child around. My oldest daughter, I lost her at 16; my baby found me, She’s 17 and she can do what she wanna do now.”

She had “Ayanna” tattooed on her hand.

Police tried to make contact with the biological mother again.

The police reports say the mother told police she “does help her daughter with money or if she needs something” and “she gets together with Ayanna from time to time.” The detective told the biological mother that she wanted to make sure Ayanna was safe and alive, and the mom said her daughter was safe and was not in danger and she would have her call her the next time she speaks with her.

The detective located the teen’s Instagram account. That’s the latest update in the files.

A family member blocked a Media Milwaukee reporter via Facebook when she reached out for comment.

The belief is that Ayanna is alive, but her whereabouts are unknown to the public and the police.

Since Ayanna was a minor and was not believed to have gone with a stranger, there was no Amber Alert sent out for her. She is now considered a long-term missing person, someone who has been missing from home for more than 90 days, without being found, the police reports say.

The Department of Justice did not have any motive to issue an Amber Alert because those Alerts are usually reserved for those who have had potential crime that is associated with the abduction, or the person who was abducting the child has had a previous run-in with the police. 

Those alerts are very rare for a reason, since many of the children that go missing are children that are lured out by a stranger with the intention of harboring them until they do something with the child that isn’t necessarily positive. 

If there is any information on where Ayanna could be, please let the Milwaukee Police Department’s Missing Person Department know at 414-935-7405 or at 414-933-4444.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.