Summer Wells

Case background and investigation

Summer Moon-Utah Wells was five years old when she was reported missing at about 6:30 p.m. on June 15, 2021 from her family's home on Ben Hill Road, in the Beech Creek community near Rogersville in Hawkins County, Tennessee. According to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), she has blonde hair and blue eyes, stood about three feet tall and weighed around 40 pounds. She was last seen wearing grey pants and a pink shirt and may have been barefoot. WSMV reports that she was last seen heading towards the basement of the house, which has a door leading outside.

The TBI issued an Endangered Child Alert the same evening and upgraded it to a statewide AMBER Alert on June 16. The search that followed was one of the largest of its kind in the state. According to the TBI, three large-scale ground searches covered roughly 3,000 acres and drew on more than 100 local, state and federal agencies, with additional searches of waterways and from the air. The family's house and land, including the basement and crawl space, were searched several times. A timeline published by NewsChannel 9 states that the FBI's child abduction response team was brought in on June 21 and that the ground operation was scaled back to specialized teams on June 27, 2021.

On June 26, 2021 the TBI asked for help in identifying a possible witness: the driver of a maroon or red 1998-2000 Toyota Tacoma with a ladder rack and white buckets, which a witness reported seeing near Beech Creek Road and Ben Hill Road on June 14 or 15. The TBI has said the driver was never identified. The bureau has also said that it has found no evidence that Summer was abducted, while stressing that every possibility is still being examined.

The number of tips grew from about 870 in early July 2021 to more than 2,000 by June 2022. The TBI has said that most of them concerned rumor and speculation and that investigators have few clues about what happened. No one has been named as a suspect or charged in connection with the disappearance. WSMV reports that Summer's three brothers were removed from the home by the state's children's services department in July 2021, and that her father, Don Wells, pleaded guilty in February 2022 to an unrelated driving-under-the-influence charge.

The investigation is led by the TBI with the Hawkins County Sheriff's Office and the FBI. A new age-progression image was released in August 2025. In November 2025, according to WVLT, agents and detectives followed up a lead on Van Hill Road in Greeneville, about ten miles from the family home; the TBI did not say what, if anything, was found. On the fifth anniversary, June 15, 2026, the TBI released a video appeal and said the investigation remained active with no new developments to announce publicly. The AMBER Alert remains in effect.