Peyton Moreland (9:08)
Well, it's not like they chose their names. And then we're like, let's get be a couple and be Don and John. They just met each other, fell in love. Yeah, they weren't married at the time. Again, they were teenagers, so the relationship didn't last long. Now, around the time Britney turned two, dawn got together with a man named Chad Drexel, who ended up adopting Britney and took on the role of a father figure in her life. It was good that dawn had the support, because things weren't easy with Britney when she was a baby. She was born with something called persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous in her right eye, which basically required a bunch of surgeries throughout her life and inevitably rendered her blind in that eye. But that didn't discourage Chad and Dawn from growing their family. So years later, Brittany had a half little brother and sister named Marissa and Camden, and she grows extremely close with these siblings. And while Britney's eye troubles certainly must have been a challenge, they didn't seem to hinder her confidence. As she grew up and into her teenage years, people who knew Brittany described her as a little spitfire ball of energy who was extremely feisty, especially on the soccer field there. Brittany was a Massive star, scoring 26 goals for her team in one season alone. She was also studying cosmetology and had hopes of either pursuing that or modeling once she got done with high school. But come 2009, 17 year old Brittany started doing what a lot of kids her age do. She began testing boundaries. Things at home were getting complicated because dawn and Chad were actually in the midst of a separation. Her biological dad, John, had just come back into her life and was looking to rekindle a relationship with his daughter. And meanwhile, Brittany was trying to make the most of her high school years. It was her junior year and she had just started hanging out with a new group of friends who were all a little bit older than she was, which meant Britney was invited to more parties and less parents supervised outings. She also at this point, had a boyfriend, a kid named John Greco, who she had been together with for about a year or so. And she seemed pretty serious about him. But in the spring of 2009, Britney went to her mom with a request. She wanted to go with a few of her new friends down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for a spring break trip. Now, dawn, her mother, told her right away, I do not approve. Especially because she hardly knew the new friends Brittany was going with and was told there wouldn't be any parents going with them. So this actually led to a bunch of arguments between dawn and Brittany over the next week or two. But Don was not about to cave, especially because she just had that mom feeling if she let Britney go, something terrible would happen. And it didn't seem like she shared this intuition with Britney at the time. But dawn did stand her ground. And then when Britney came to her around April 22, she said, okay, plans have changed. Now me and my friends just want to go to another friend's beach house in Rochester Island. Now this time dawn agreed, figuring it was a good compromise since Britney wouldn't even be crossing state lines. But she had no idea that Britney wasn't being truthful. Later that day, Britney got in a car with three of her new friends and headed south to Myrtle beach anyways. Okay, so her sneaky little plan was tell mom the plans changed, but they actually didn't. So her and her friends check into a place along the water called the Bar Harbor Hotel. They spent the next three days enjoying themselves without a hitch. And on day three, April 25, Britney started to feel a little guilty about the fights that she had had with her mother about this trip. So she called her that day to say she was at the beach. She didn't specify what beach. Dawn obviously thinks she meant that she was at the Lake Ontario shoreline, which was close to the house and something they always referred to as the beach. Plus, the weather was warm back in New York that day. It was 83 degrees. So dawn didn't really ask too many questions. She was just happy that the air was getting cleared between her and Brittany and that her daughter sounded in high spirits that day and was having fun. Before she hung up the phone, Brittany told her mother she loved her and that she would see her the following day. Unfortunately, though, that would be the last conversation the two of them would ever have. That night, around 8pm, Brittany left her hotel alone to go visit some other friends in town who were staying at another nearby hotel. It was called the Blue Water Resort. It was about a mile and a half away from the place she was staying with her friends. Now, security cameras show her walking into this new hotel and then leaving shortly after at around 8:45pm apparently, one of the friends Brittany went down with had texted her asking if she borrowed her pair of black shorts. When Britney was like, yeah, I did, it kind of became an argument between the two friends. So Britney agreed to leave this visit at the new hotel that she was at and head back to her original hotel with her original friends to give the girl her pair of shorts. Okay, sorry, that was a little complicated. Cause there's a lot of friends. But by the way, Britney's boyfriend John was not on the trip with them, but the two were texting pretty much the entire time she was on spring break with her friends. And she told John what was happening as she left the hotel that night to go return the shorts to the OG Hotel. She told John she was walking back. But around 9:15pm that night, Britney's texts stop. Out of the blue, John, her boyfriend, wasn't hearing from her anymore. And he honestly began to panic. He starts calling her friends that she was with. They said they hadn't heard from her either. And Brittany, who was walking that mile and a half back to the hotel in the dark, hadn't made it back yet. So that's when John ups the stakes. He tells Brittany, hey, if you don't text me back soon, I'm gonna call your mom and tell her that you lied and are in Myrtle beach, okay? And when more time passes that night without hearing from Brittany and her not showing up back to the hotel, John follows through on that promise, he calls dawn later that night and says, hey, really worried about Britney. She just stopped texting me out of the blue. And her friends haven't seen or heard from her. And also, she is not in New York. She did actually go to MYRTLE BEACH.
