“She’s the most loving, kind, just vibrant, smart girl I’ve ever come across,” Sue Quackenbush gushed about her 37-year-old daughter, Danielle Lopez. Sue also told Dateline her daughter was funny, and loud. “She would say, ‘Well, you didn’t name me Danquiet… You named me Danyell.’”
But Sue hasn’t heard from her daughter for the last 5 months. She last spoke with Danielle on the evening of Friday, April 12, 2024. “She was actually at the campground when I was talking to her,” she said. Sue remembers being worried it was too cold for Danielle to be out camping.
Danielle told her mother she was camping at the Brendan T. Byrne State Forest campground in New Jersey that weekend. Sue said her daughter was familiar with camping from childhood experiences, but wouldn’t describe Danielle as a “frequent camper.”
As a single mother, Sue raised Danielle in Westchester, Pennsylvania. Danielle was the middle child, sandwiched between two boys.
But when Danielle was in her twenties, both of her brothers died within a year of each other. “She has struggled,” Sue admitted. “She was dealing with the loss of her brothers.”
At that point, Danielle was living with her paternal grandfather in New Jersey.
“She didn’t need to care for her grandfather, but she was living with him, and gosh, they were just world travelers, best friends,” Sue said.
Danielle and her grandpa continued that way for years.
“They went on cruises, they went to London, they went to San Francisco, they went to Florida. They just traveled quite a bit,” Sue said. “It was very important to her.”
And then, the COVID-19 pandemic flipped Danielle’s world upside down again. The traveling stopped, and her grandpa got sick. “She lost him,” Sue said. Less than a month later, Danielle’s father died.
Years later and just a month before Danielle disappeared, she had to make a heartbreaking decision about her dog, Roscoe. “She loved her dog,” Sue said. “The dog was old and needed to be put down.”
Danielle was facing grief from all angles. Sue was keeping a close eye on her, worried the grief might be too much. “I am like a helicopter, after the losses. I call her twice a day,” she said. “I was in touch with her quite frequently.”
When Sue tried to contact her daughter on April 13, she didn’t get a response. But she wasn’t immediately concerned. “She didn’t always answer,” Sue said.
However, that concern began to grow as the days passed, and she still could not get through to Danielle. “I continued to call,” Sue said, but there was no answer.
More than a week after she last spoke to her daughter, Sue decided to call the New Jersey State Police to report her missing.
And she had one important piece of information for them: her daughter had been at a Wawa on Saturday, April 13.
“I shared a Wawa rewards card with her, and I just always kept $25 on there in case she was ever in an emergency,” Sue said. “She used it that morning.”
Sue had seen the transaction on the shared account. It gave the authorities somewhere to start their investigation.
Dateline spoke with Detective Sergeant Ryan Labriola and Detective Alexandra Alvarez of the New Jersey State Police. Labriola works for the Major Crimes South Unit and Alvarez works for the Missing Persons Unit. “Danielle was reported missing on April 24, 2024, to our unit by her mother, Sue Quackenbush,” Det. Alvarez said. “We called her back, gathered all the information that we needed and then we entered her as missing in our national database. And then we began the investigation.”
Originally, according to a May 2024 Facebook post from the New Jersey State Police, it was believed Danielle was “last seen on Saturday, April 13th, at approximately 9:11 a.m. at the Wawa located at 4 Route 72 in Vincentown, N.J.”
There is security footage of Danielle at the Wawa that morning, however only a still from it has been released. Sue has not seen the entire clip of her daughter in the store that day, but said Danielle purchased a cup of coffee. “If she hadn’t, we’d have nothing,” Sue said. “She didn’t use it often.”
Authorities began looking for Danielle and her 2008 2-door blue Hyundai Accent. “The car was located on May 1. It was located on Lost Lane, which is a heavily wooded area in the Woodland Township, and it was found in a large puddle, basically on a dirt road,” Det. Sgt. Labriola said. That location was approximately 13 miles away from the Wawa where Danielle had been seen on April 13. “A search warrant was authorized and executed on that car,” the detective continued, adding that the battery was dead and the car needed to be jumped. “After we jumped it, the hazard lights came on.”
Labriola also mentioned that “multiple items of her -- of her personal property were located inside the car.” Danielle’s phone was not among those belongings and has still not been located. The detective said there was no sign of any sort of suspicious activity in the car.
As detectives continued their investigation, some witnesses came forward who said they had seen Danielle on the evening of April 13 while they were out filming in the area with a GoPro.
“Recently we reviewed videos, and we interviewed a couple people that actually saw her on April 13, which is the last day that we know that she had contact with anybody,” Det. Sgt. Labriola said. “They saw her on Lost Lane, and actually saw her walking down the road.” This sighting was at about 6:00 p.m. “That was the last time she was on video by these two civilians that were just driving down the road on Lost Lane.” The New Jersey State Police have not released the video to the public. Detective Sergeant Labriola told Dateline Danielle was by herself on the video and did not appear to be in distress. She was last believed to be wearing a black long-sleeve shirt, blue jeans, and light-colored shoes.
Detective Alvarez told Dateline they have been working with different units to coordinate search efforts in the area based on the locations of interest they identified during their investigation. “That would have been the campground where she was residing at the time and also where the vehicle was located,” she said. “Some of those search assets included ground search personnel, canine, horseback, all-terrain vehicles, um, drones, helicopters, marine unit. So, we exhausted a lot of our assets during these search efforts.”
Detective Sergeant Labriola says they do not have any evidence that would point towards foul play being involved in Danielle’s disappearance, and authorities have interviewed “dozens of people” but “nothing viable” has come from those conversations.
“If we do get any new information we’ll obviously go ahead and deploy all assets that we need to,” Det. Alvarez added.
“With these investigations we follow the facts and the evidence, so as the facts and the evidence come into the case that’s how we react, and we investigate it,” Labriola explained. “We do obviously take very seriously every single [tip] and we run them down.”
Sue Quackenbush is begging anyone with information about her daughter to come forward and contact the New Jersey State Police. She says they have been “doing an excellent job” in searching for Danielle. “It’s really rough terrain,” she said. “I have no experience with this but I -- I trust them with finding Danielle.”
Sue has tied a yellow ribbon around the tree outside her home, as a message just for Danielle.
“There’s an old song, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,’” Sue said.
Tying a yellow ribbon outside a home has come to symbolize waiting with the hope of welcoming home a loved one home who’s been gone a long time.
“She would know, if she was to make it here, she would know that’s what it would mean.”
Danielle Lopez is 5’4” and 135 lbs. She has brown hair and her mother describes her eye color as a unique shade of brown. “She wore glasses,” Sue told Dateline. “She didn’t have glasses on when she was walking at that Wawa.” Danielle will be turning 38 years old in October.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Danielle Lopez, please contact the New Jersey State Police Department Missing Persons Unit at (609) 882-2000 ext. 2554 or missingpinformation@njsp.gov.
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Editor's note: This article has been updated with a description of what Danielle was last believed to have been seen wearing.