The Bus That Came and They Weren't There: Faloma and Maleina Luhk

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

December 20, 2025

Faloma Luhk was ten years old, described by people who knew her as quiet and shy. Her younger sister Maleina was nine, remembered as considerably tougher and fiercely protective of Faloma, the kind of younger sibling who looked out for her older sister rather than the other way around. The two girls lived with their grandparents, Elbert and Jane Quitugua, in the village of As Teo on Saipan, the largest island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the western Pacific. Their parents had separated and were living off island, their father in Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia, their mother in Guam, an arrangement common enough across the region that raised no particular alarm on its own. Both girls attended Kagman Elementary School together, and by every account, remained close.

A Bus That Arrived Without Them

On the morning of May 25, 2011, Faloma and Maleina left their grandparents' home around six o'clock to walk the short distance to their school bus stop, located at the intersection of Chalan Santa Lourdes and As Teo Drive, just a few hundred feet from home. At around 6:10, a classmate spotted both girls sitting together on a concrete slab across from the stop, waiting for the bus like any other school morning. When the bus actually arrived at 6:30, the girls were no longer there. Neither one boarded. Neither one showed up at Kagman Elementary School that day, and for reasons that have never been fully explained, no alert was issued to their family when the school registered both girls as absent that morning.

It was not until 3:30 that afternoon, when Faloma and Maleina failed to come home after school, that their grandparents contacted Kagman Elementary directly to ask where the girls were. By 5:30 p.m., with no explanation forthcoming and growing panic setting in, the family formally reported both children missing to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Department of Public Safety, setting off a search that, more than a decade later, has never produced an answer.

A Truck That Stopped Coming Around

As investigators pieced together the events of that morning and the weeks leading up to it, one detail stood out enough to become central to the entire case. A gray Nissan pickup truck had reportedly been observed in the immediate area of the bus stop on the two previous Wednesdays, May 11 and May 18, spotted by garbage collectors working their usual route who noticed the vehicle near a nearby shrine before driving in the direction of the bus stop itself. On May 25, the actual morning Faloma and Maleina disappeared, that same truck was conspicuously absent, a pattern investigators found difficult to dismiss as coincidence given how specifically it seemed to track the girls' regular Wednesday routine right up until the morning something finally went wrong. The truck itself has never been definitively identified or located.

A Relative Who Wouldn't Take the Test

Investigators moved quickly to examine the family's own immediate circle, a standard step in any child disappearance case, and just as quickly cleared Faloma and Maleina's direct family members of suspicion. Attention did settle, however, on Alan Santos Aguon, a relative by marriage and a former firefighter with the CNMI Department of Public Safety. Aguon refused to submit to a polygraph examination in connection with the investigation, a refusal that kept his name attached to the case as a person of interest even though he was never formally charged with anything connected to the girls' disappearance. Investigators publicly maintained that they believed the actual abduction, if that is what occurred, was likely carried out by someone outside the immediate family circle rather than by Aguon specifically, without ever fully closing the door on his potential involvement either.

Roughly a year after the girls vanished, in May 2012, Aguon was arrested in Burien, Washington, on charges of domestic violence and assault, accused of attacking his wife and child with a chair. He pleaded guilty to those charges and was placed under a no contact order. The arrest occurred thousands of miles from Saipan and involved an entirely separate set of victims, but it added another disturbing data point to a case already built around a person investigators had never been able to fully clear or fully implicate.

Another individual, Joseph Crisostomo, was also looked at during the investigation, though he was ultimately ruled out on straightforward grounds: he was already incarcerated on unrelated charges at the exact time Faloma and Maleina disappeared, making his direct involvement in the abduction itself impossible regardless of any other connection he may have had to the family or the area.

A Federal Case With a Standing Reward

The FBI became involved on the very day the girls were reported missing, a rapid federal response reflecting both the seriousness with which investigators treated the case from the outset and the practical reality that Saipan's own local law enforcement resources are limited compared to those available on the US mainland. That federal involvement has never lapsed. The FBI continues to list Faloma and Maleina Luhk as active missing persons cases classified as a criminal abduction, and the bureau has offered a reward of up to 25,000 dollars for information leading to their whereabouts, an offer that remains in effect more than fourteen years after the girls disappeared. The FBI has also produced an episode of its own Inside the FBI podcast specifically revisiting the case, an ongoing effort to keep the story circulating in front of new audiences who might, decades later, still hold some relevant piece of information without realizing its significance.

Investigators have periodically released updated age progressed images of both girls over the years, first showing them as young teenagers and eventually as young adults, reflecting how much time has actually passed since that Wednesday morning in As Teo. Faloma would now be in her mid twenties, Maleina not far behind her, two grown women who, if they are still alive, have spent essentially their entire adolescence and early adulthood somewhere outside the reach of the family that has never stopped looking for them.

A Small Island Community Still Watching

Saipan is a small place, roughly twelve miles long, where a case involving two missing local girls touches nearly every part of daily life on the island in a way that would be harder to sustain in a larger mainland city. As Teo itself is a modest village, and the bus stop where Faloma and Maleina were last seen sits close enough to home that neighbors, classmates, and extended family have all remained personally connected to the case in the years since, rather than experiencing it as a distant news story. That closeness has helped keep local search efforts and community vigilance active well past the point where a similar case elsewhere might have quietly faded from public attention, even as it has not, so far, produced the one piece of information capable of actually resolving it.

Still Missing From a Small Village

More than fourteen years after Faloma and Maleina Luhk vanished from a bus stop a few hundred feet from their own home, no arrest has ever been made, no confirmed sighting has ever surfaced, and the truck that seemed to track their Wednesday mornings for two weeks straight has never been traced to an owner or a destination. What remains is a case built around a handful of very specific, very small observations, a classmate's glimpse of two girls sitting on a concrete slab, a garbage collector's memory of a gray truck on two prior Wednesdays, a relative who would not take a polygraph, and a federal reward that has sat unclaimed for a decade and a half, waiting for the one person who actually knows what happened that morning to finally come forward.

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