Asha Jaquilla Degree, 9, disappeared on February 14, 2000 after voluntarily leaving the family home. Closer returns to this case.
This is one of the most mysterious disappearance cases of the past twenty-five years. On February 13, 2000, in a small house in Shelby, North Carolina, Asha Jaquilla Degree, 9 years old, and her older brother, O’Bryant, go to bed in the bedroom they share. The two children do not take long to fall asleep and when, around 2:30 am, their father comes to see them, nothing suggests that the worst is going to happen. A few minutes later, little O’Bryant hears his sister’s bed creak. “Asha must be having a nightmare“, does he think. But Asha gets up, gets dressed and leaves the house, a small satchel full of clothes on her shoulders…
On the morning of February 14, Iquilla Degree, Asha and O’Bryant’s mother, pushes open the door to her children’s bedroom. O’Bryan is in bed. Asha is not. Panicked, Iquilla Degree reports the disappearance of her daughter to the authorities. In less time than it takes to tell, an officer shows up at the Oakcrest Drive house. Friends, family, neighbors go in search of the little girl, while the investigators go to meet the neighborhood. Over the course of the interrogations, the latter make curious discoveries. First, a truck driver said he saw the girl walking on the edge of Highway 180 between 3:45 and 4:15 a.m. Intrigued by “to see such a young child all alone at such an hour”, he explains that he made a U-turn several times before seeing her disappear into a wood by the side of the road…
A school bag, a book and a t-shirt
This man is the last to have seen Asha alive and twenty-two years later, neither the intervention of the FBI nor that of the State Bureau of Investigation of North Carolina have made it possible to find the trace of the little girl. On August 3, 2001, more than a year after her disappearance, her small satchel was found in Burke County., about forty kilometers from Shelby. Inside, investigators got hold of Asha’s phone, but also a copy of McElligot’s Pool, a children’s book by Dr. Seuss borrowed from Asha’s school, and a t-shirt from boy band New Kids on the Block. Although they did not allow any progress in the investigation, these clues are still considered crucial today.
Today, little Asha Degree would be 31 years old. The police have never been able to prove whether it was a runaway or an abduction, nor explain the reasons for her leaving her home. Was she sleepwalking? Unlikely, but the theory is widely debated on the Web. Anyway, her mother remains hopeful to see her again one day. “Twenty years later, I still believe my daughter is alive, confided Iquilla Degree in 2020. I don’t think she’s dead. And I know someone knows something. I can’t believe a 9 year old can just vanish without anyone knowing.” Unfortunately, the investigators chain the false tracks. The latest, that of a letter sent to the newspaper The Shelby Star by Marcus Mellon, a convicted sexual predator in 2014, in which he claimed to know where to find Asha’s body. His declarations have never given anything, and little Asha Degree remains untraceable.
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