Inside a van with an adult friend. This is how Mint Butterfield was found, the 16-year-old heiress, the only daughter of two Silicon Valley giants, who mysteriously disappeared a week ago from her mother’s house in the wealthy Bolinas neighborhood, north of San Francisco.
The discovery
Investigators had learned that Butterfield was dating a certain Christopher ‘Kio’ Dizefalo, a 26-year-old known for driving a white van. After tracking the vehicle, officers found Butterfield inside. The county sheriff’s office said Butterfield was found unharmed and that she had run away from the home voluntarily. After being questioned, Dizefalo was arrested and placed in the Marin County Jail, with bail set at $50,000. In the past, Mint had problems with drug abuse and had expressed suicidal intentions. Her disappearance had mobilized the world of online platforms, also because she is not just any minor: Stewart Butterfield, her father, is the founder of the online messaging platform Slack, sold in 2021 for 28 billion dollars; her mother, Caterina Fake, founded the Flickr platform in 2004, a multilingual website, including Italian, where users can share photos. The site was later sold to Yahoo.
