On the 15th of May 2011, sisters Maleina (9) and Falmoa Luhk (10) said goodbye to their grandparents and then left to go to the bus stop only 300 feet from their home, to get their usual bus to school. They have never been seen since.
The Luhk family lived on the island of Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, located in the western Pacific Ocean–north of Papua New Guinea and east of The Philippines. When the girls didn't return from school as usual at 15:30, their grandparents called the school, only to find out that the girls had never made it to school. They called the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands police (CNMI) and filed a missing person report.
The FBI became involved in the investigation and sent 20 agents to Saipan to investigate. They discovered that the grandparents had been raising the girls since 2007 when their parents left the country for better work opportunities. Their mother, Jermain Quitugua, lived in Guam; and their father, Ruthik Luhk, lived in Micronesia. Both were verified to have been outside of Saipan when the crime occurred.