she had missed a meeting and then not to hear from her, this isn t right. it would have been impossible to get up every day knowing that she was gone. i had to believe we would find her alive. text her, she always got right back. i ve seen her step out of the shower to answer her phone. then one day she didn t. immediately, my spidey senses were high. where was nailah? i sent her an e-mail, all caps, are you alive? there was no sign of her. and such a confusing trail of clues, even the calls to 911 were silent. no voice, no struggles could be heard. this could be kind of eerie. yes, it is. in my heart, i knew she s not coming back. one of the suspects had an alibi, until a camera caught him in a lie. he lived a life of a lot of smoke and mirrors. and the strangest clue of all. there in an empty parking lot. six perfectly stacked cardboard boxes. why were they there? what was in them? it was right adjacent to a lagoon. wow. i watch en
nailah. and pretty soon the fbi and chicago police, everybody was out here looking. including detective greg jacobson. it was in a pretty secluded area, next to a forest preserve which is right adjacent to a lagoon. whoa. i watch enough dateline to know that s probably not a good sign. was nailah down there in that murky water? we had light trucks out there. they dredged the lagoon. back and forth they went, scoured every inch of the pond and the thick woods behind it and found one weird thing. there was some jewelry that was on some of the bushes. pearls and such just hanging there. the cops checked with her friends. looked like nailah s, they said, except nailah wasn t here. but remember sister leah s p. r. campaign? not far away from there, next town over.
going to cover it. well, they were. and maybe this was because of leah s media savvy. the next morning, nailah s picture was all over the news. flyers with her picture are taped to traffic posts and handed out to people passing by. we were in the streets and putting up any place we could, downtown, suburbs. they phoned and texted and e-mailed their friends. but no one reported seeing nailah. no one. nailah s sister kept replaying their last conversation. she called me, and she said i ve got something to tell you. and before she could tell me, she got a call on the other line and she clicked over and she said she ll call me back. she didn t call you. she didn t call me back. awful what a person s mind could churn up in the dark as day one became two and then day three. i kept calling her. and kept calling her. i kept thinking she s going to answer. she s going to answer. she s going to
with her. maybe leah s pr campaign helped because we had some anonymous tips, people saying that they saw her at this location. but not a single one of them led to nailah. by now the detectives believed they were dealing with a serious crime, and yet she s missing. technically there hasn t been a crime committed. that makes it somewhat awkward when you re looking into it. the only one that we knew she had contact with, the boyfriend she was in wisconsin with the weekend before she went missing, they were all interviewed. that boyfriend from wisconsin, andre, had come to chicago, was helping with the search and soon was perhaps a subject of it. they came to you. they did. the perfect boyfriend. now,
it was hot and it was late, after midnight, september 27th, 2007. pretty secluded area next to a forest preserve. so it was. and it was clear and dark and still and vacant. here where the deep wood fought back against the decaying suburban sprawl. and then, nothing was clear at all. i never cried this violent cry. you re experiencing everything but it s not you. you re just waiting to wake up. it just feels like you re literally in a nightmare. yes, still does. the name you ll want to remember is nailah. the meaning was one who succeeds. this is nailah s mother, maria. i wanted her to be successful and she was. she lived her name. quite true. as, frankly, have the rest of them in this big family. this is leah, the first born. we might need a graph or a chart because it s kind of involved.