Laura, who disappeared from Patras, has been missing for the ninth day. The last confirmed sighting of the 16-year-old was at a shop in Zografou, while her bag, along with two jackets, books and a student pass, was found at the Children’s Hospital. Authorities have now expanded their investigation to KTEL bus stations, ports and the airport, requesting passenger lists to determine whether anyone may have traveled using false identification.

At the same time, one of Laura’s classmates described an incident in which “her father cut her hair because she asked to go to a hair salon.”
“She was generally very anxious. First of all, her father cut her hair—when she was in the first year of junior high she had no hair, it was cut like a boy’s—because she asked to go to a hair salon,” the classmate said. According to her testimony on MEGA, Laura “told many people because she wanted help, and two girls went to the principal. Her parents came in, and suddenly, because she was afraid she would be scolded, she denied everything and made all of us out to be liars.”

Laura’s classmates also sent photos showing her wearing headbands and hats during a school trip to Barcelona in the 2023–2024 school year.

“They never gave her money”

A friend of Laura said that her parents never gave her money and that “we went on a trip to Nafplio and she didn’t even have money to buy food.”

“She (the mother) was very neutral, she didn’t really help her. She even owed money at the school canteen—they never gave her money. We went on a trip to Nafplio and she didn’t have money to buy food. I bought something and we shared it, and she was even embarrassed to eat. I kept telling her, ‘Eat, it’s nothing,’ and she kept asking, ‘Are you sure?’ Then one day her mother came to school and gave her a €20 bill to pay off half of what she owed.”

The parents “left for Athens”

A neighbor of Laura’s family, Mrs. Maria, said that the 16-year-old “was lying on a bed playing on her phone.” Inside the house, “they were laughing, talking, we sat down to eat—there was nothing ‘off.’” She described the mother as a “closed-off” person and said the family went to the beach and to local shops. According to Mrs. Maria, on Thursday (15/1) the parents “left with a small suitcase for Athens.”

“She was under a lot of pressure from her father”

“She told me that her father checks her phone and sets limits for her. She was very mysterious in general, I don’t know how to explain it. I just know she didn’t want much contact with her father. We could be talking and she would say, ‘I have to hang up because my father is coming and I don’t want him to see me on my phone.’ In all this, I think her mother had a neutral role. She didn’t say anything special about her mother, mainly about her father,” a classmate said on MEGA.

According to the same source, Laura described incidents where “he would scold her very easily, for not doing household chores—simple things. He would yell at her a lot and take her phone away at the slightest thing. He would tell her, ‘Wash the dishes,’ and if she didn’t, he would take her phone.”

“She was under enormous pressure from her father. From what I know, her mother remained neutral. She always wore hoodies and jeans even when it was hot. She wanted long clothes. She wore the same clothes every two days—it’s not like they took much care of her,” the classmate said.

“I can’t take it anymore, I don’t know what to do”

A former classmate described an incident when Laura abruptly ended a call because she realized her father was coming.

“She kept telling us she was suffering psychological abuse from her father—being scolded for the simplest things. She used to say, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I don’t know what to do.’ She would say, ‘My father is coming, I have to hang up, he mustn’t see me.’ They would take her phone away. He exerted a lot of psychological pressure on her. I remember her saying, ‘Oh my God, he is coming, I have to hang up because he’ll scold me for being on my phone.’ She didn’t want much interaction with him.”

“She told us they came to Greece because they were looking for her father”

A former classmate said that Laura was very withdrawn and struggled greatly with the move from Germany to Greece.

“She told us she had been taken to a unit for abused children. She said her father paid a lot of money to get her out. She also told us they came to Greece because they were looking for her father. She spoke broken English and Greek. I asked her, ‘If you don’t know Greek, why did you come to Patras and a Greek school?’ She told me they didn’t want to go to Athens because it’s too central—they came to Patras to make it harder to find them.”

Laura knitted and “sold” her work

A former classmate from the first school Laura attended about two years ago said that in the first year of junior high, “all the kids read English books. She would buy them and when she finished them she would sell them or lend them for money. In class, because she didn’t know Greek, she knitted a lot. She knitted in every lesson and posted what she made on Instagram to sell it, or sold it to classmates. She was always looking for ways to make money because she told us, ‘I want to leave home when I grow up.’”

“I never went to her house. Only one friend did and said the house was very messy and not well looked after,” the classmate added.

Laura also spoke about older siblings in Germany with whom she had no contact. She watched films about girls in psychiatric institutions and often sought ways to earn money, sometimes relying on classmates to pay for school trips.

According to MEGA, Laura later changed schools. A former classmate said that recently Laura had been messaging them to go out, while another friend said they hadn’t spoken for two or three months and that Laura eventually stopped sending messages.

When asked whether Laura had spoken about problems at home, her friend replied:
“Yes, when we were hanging out, she told me everything every day. She kept creating Instagram accounts and deleting them.”