Every morning, Shantieya Smith walked her daughter to school. In May 2018, she left home for what should have been a five-minute errand — and became one of at least four women to vanish from the same few blocks of Chicago’s West Side that spring.
Shantieya Smith’s family called her “Nay Nay.” She was 26 years old, living in the North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, in a home with three generations of her family under one roof. She had cherry-red or bottle-blonde weaves that people who knew her say matched her whole personality — bright. She was the cousin you called when there was trouble, and the one who’d teach anybody in the living room the latest Chicago dance styles, whether they’d asked for the lesson or not.
And every single morning, she slung her seven-year-old daughter’s backpack over her shoulder, and the two of them dashed hand-in-hand across the street to the neighborhood elementary school.
On May 25th, 2018, Shantieya walked out her front door on a warm afternoon to run a quick errand. It was supposed to be so fast she didn’t even bring her phone. Her mother, Latonya Moore, didn’t think much of it — why would she, for an errand.
She never came home.
An Ordinary Goodbye
Over the following hours, and then days, that unremarkable goodbye became something else entirely. Shantieya wasn’t answering calls — she couldn’t have been, her phone was still sitting at home — and she wasn’t there the next morning to walk her daughter to school. Latonya would later put it plainly to a reporter: her daughter’s not coming home “was not normal at all.”
Shantieya had left with a man she knew. He later told Latonya he’d dropped her off safely at home. He hadn’t. When Latonya pushed back and told him she was going to police, he sent her a string of threatening texts: “Enjoy yo time and days becuz they will be cut short… Make sure you save all these messages so somebody can give it to police.”
Three days after Shantieya disappeared, Latonya made a decision about how to report it. She didn’t call it in — she drove to the 10th District station in person, because she wanted officers to see her face and understand her fear was real.
It didn’t go the way she needed. The desk officer told her not to worry, floated the idea that Shantieya might be off with a boyfriend, and told her to give it 48 hours before filing anything. Latonya’s cousin, who’d come with her, refused to leave without a report being taken. The family mentioned, in that conversation, that Shantieya was bipolar — a detail that, under Chicago police’s own classification system, should have flagged her case as “at-risk” and triggered an immediate investigation. It didn’t. Officers eventually took the report, told Latonya to call if Shantieya turned up, and then didn’t contact her again for four days.
Under Illinois law, police cannot legally refuse an in-person missing person report or impose any waiting period, regardless of the circumstances. A later investigation into how Chicago police handle these reports found more than a dozen formal complaints of officers doing exactly what happened to Latonya — and not one officer was ever disciplined for it.
A Mother’s Own Investigation
So Latonya searched for her daughter herself.
She organized her own search with family and friends, put up flyers at gas stations and corner stores, and drove the neighborhood block by block. At one point, her search party went to the abandoned apartment where another missing girl’s body had already been found — checking whether Shantieya might be there too. The door was unlocked, the chain removed. There was still blood on the floor.
She went through Shantieya’s own phone records herself, trying to find anything police weren’t finding, and ended up personally texting and calling back and forth with the man she believed had killed her daughter — because officers still hadn’t come to collect the phone from the house, days after she’d told them it was sitting there waiting. A former Chicago police commander has since confirmed that sending a car to search the missing person’s home is standard procedure. There’s no record confirming whether police ever collected that phone at all.
On June 4th, with nothing coming from investigators, Latonya held her own press conference outside the same police station, standing beside a local pastor, publicly asking why nobody had looked.
A Neighborhood Already Afraid
Shantieya wasn’t the only one. That same spring, at least four women and girls disappeared from the same few square miles of Chicago’s West Side: 15-year-old Sadaria Davis, missing since April 27th; 18-year-old Anna Stanislawczyk, missing since mid-March; 15-year-old Victoria Garrett, missing since early June; and Shantieya. Rumors in the neighborhood put the number at six — likely inflated by cases from other parts of the city getting folded into the same fear.
That fear didn’t come from nowhere. Chicago’s South and West Sides had already been living with a much larger, older pattern: researcher Thomas Hargrove’s Murder Accountability Project had flagged 51 unsolved killings of mostly Black women in these same neighborhoods going back to 2001, with statistical characteristics an algorithm identified as “suggestive of serial murder.” When four women vanished within ten weeks of each other in 2018, this community wasn’t reacting to a new fear — it was reacting to one it had been raising, largely unanswered, for almost two decades.
On May 11th, Sadaria Davis’s body was found in an abandoned apartment. On June 7th, a body was found under a car in an abandoned garage a few blocks from Shantieya’s home. It was so decomposed that police couldn’t identify it by sight. When the confirmation came back, it was Shantieya. She weighed 57 pounds. The only thing left for Latonya to visually recognize, at the medical examiner’s office, was a tattoo on her arm — her nephew’s name, in cursive.
Police initially said publicly that neither death showed obvious signs of trauma. The Cook County Medical Examiner would go on to rule both deaths homicides.
By mid-June, then-Superintendent Eddie Johnson called community activists together to push back on rumors of a serial predator, arguing there was no evidence the disappearances were connected. At a separate press conference, he also said this about Sadaria and Shantieya: “The two young ladies we are speaking about were involved in narcotics sales, prostitution, using narcotics together.” The medical examiner later confirmed Shantieya had no illegal drugs in her system at all. Years later, Johnson told reporters something different: “Somebody loved that person.”
Charlie Booker
Both Sadaria and Shantieya were last seen with the same man: Charlie Booker, then 23 or 24, already out on bond for a parole violation. Days apart in July 2018, Booker was accused of stabbing a woman in Garfield Park, then raping and shooting a woman in Memphis and stealing her car. He was caught that same afternoon, speeding on Interstate 57 in the stolen vehicle.
A local pastor has since said publicly that he warned Chicago police about Booker’s connection to Sadaria and Shantieya before any of this happened — and that Booker, already a repeat offender, “continued to walk the streets” regardless.
Booker was formally charged in the Chicago stabbing, entering a not guilty plea, and charged in Memphis with rape and shooting. What became of either case isn’t part of the public record that either we or Latonya have been able to find. He has never been charged in connection with either woman’s death.
By spring 2019, community pressure had led to some form of official task force looking into these cases — coverage at the time noted it offered “some hope,” but the more common reaction from families was to ask what took so long. Latonya’s own ask remained simple: to know who did it, and what happened to her daughter. A year to the day after Shantieya’s body was found, her family and friends gathered in that same alley for a vigil. The only update Latonya had received from detectives by then was that they were still waiting on DNA test results.
A System That Lost the Evidence
At some point, a detective working Shantieya’s file requested her missing person case be closed as “non-criminal” — even while a separate homicide investigation into her death remained open. It’s not an isolated clerical error: across two decades, Chicago police closed 99.8% of missing person cases the same way. Fewer than 300 were ever reclassified as a crime. Only ten as homicides. Shantieya isn’t one of the ten, because her missing-person file and her homicide file were never linked in the department’s own data.
Latonya testified before an Illinois Senate committee on the state’s DNA testing backlog three separate times between 2019 and 2020. At the first hearing, she told senators plainly: “I haven’t even found out how my daughter was murdered.” By the third hearing, she said the line this episode is named for: “My daughter, to me, feel like a John Doe, she don’t even exist… What justice does she have?”
Later reporting found the evidence itself had effectively disappeared inside the system. Chicago police told a journalist DNA had been “resubmitted” for testing; the Illinois State Police crime lab had no record of ever receiving it. Latonya was told a handprint had been recovered from the garage, then later told there was no evidence at all and the case was closed. She learned the detective assigned to her daughter’s case had been reassigned, with no one telling her.
This isn’t just Shantieya’s story. Black Chicagoans make up roughly two-thirds of all missing person cases citywide over the past twenty years. Black girls and women aged 10 to 20 alone account for about 30% of the city’s missing person cases, despite being roughly 2% of Chicago’s population. A two-year investigation by City Bureau and the Invisible Institute — which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting — documented this pattern case by case, including Shantieya’s, and found similar stories in the cases of Sonya Rouse (still missing since 2016), Shante Bohanan (found dead in 2016 after police made her mother wait 24 hours despite a reported gun to her head), and Daisy Hayes (missing the same spring as Shantieya, whose daughter was told police “know your mom frequents the liquor store” instead of investigating).
Where Things Stand
Latonya no longer lives in Chicago. She’s raising Shantieya’s daughter, now 15, in a rural part of Illinois near the Iowa border, more than a hundred miles from the city where her own daughter was born and raised. In her granddaughter’s bedroom, there’s a sticker on the wall that just says “MOM” — the girl calls Latonya “mom” because she doesn’t want kids at school to know her actual mother is gone.
In 2023, Latonya was invited to sit on a new Illinois task force on missing and murdered women. She declined. Her reasoning: “I’m grieving but I’m looking for closure. If I get closure, then I could rest. If it don’t ever rest, then I’ll take it to my grave.”
As of everything currently on the public record, no one has ever been charged in Shantieya Smith’s murder.
If you have any information about Shantieya Smith’s case, contact the Chicago Police Department or Crime Stoppers of Cook County.
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Resources:
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