BUFFALO, N.Y. — Monday was Nicole Marranca's 28th birthday.
Her father, Nick, didn't get a call from his daughter.
He hasn't heard from her in months.
"Through thick and thin we've been together. She could always call me. I'd call her. It's bad," said Nick Marranca.
Nicole moved to Ithaca when she was 14 years old to live with her biological mother.
In August, the frequent calls to her father stopped.
"I tried to call her for a week and I couldn't get ahold of her. A couple days later her mother called me and told me she was missing," he said.
Shortly after, the family filed a missing persons report with the Ithaca Police Department.
"The last time we had confirmed to have seen Nicole was August 17th or 18th, which we believed to be on the 600 block of Elmira Road in Ithaca," said Ithaca Police Officer Jamie Williamson.
Nick and Nicole's stepmother, Kelly, say Nicole was in and out of rehab for heroin addiction and had several run-ins with Ithaca Police.
Detectives say they're doing all they can, monitoring Nicole's cellphone records and social media pages, but most leads have gone cold.
"She had gotten into drugs and everything else addicts do. She was basically homeless at the time she disappeared so it's harder for the detectives to find out where she is," said Kelly Marranca.
"We're exhausting all our investigative leads, but we're hitting dead ends," said Williamson.
Now the Marrancas are doing what they can to help the investigation, putting up missing person fliers and posting on a "Find Nicole Marranca" page on Facebook.
"Someone's gonna talk and slip up, somebody has to know something she wasn't abducted by aliens. Somebody has to know something there's gotta be somebody," said Kelly Marranca.
But with each passing day the search for Nicole becomes more difficult.
"I had my hopes up, I still do, but it's getting hard trying to keep the faith and trying to hold on," said Nick Marranca.
Anyone with information about Nicole Marranca is asked to contact Ithaca Police Department at 607-272-3245.