shaniya nicole davis, a princess

on 11-10-09, the world became aware of beautiful five-year-old shaniya davis when police in fayetteville, north carolina issued an amber alert. at 6:53 a.m. her mother, antoinette nicole davis, reported her missing saying she wandered off from 1116A sleepy hollow drive. she claims she last saw shaniya at 5:30 a.m. when she put shaniya on the couch. she says shaniya was wearing a blue sleep shirt and pink panties. shaniya is 3 feet (91 cm) tall and weighs 40 lbs. (18 kg). she has curly dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a scar on her left foot. she is mixed race. her mother is black and her father is white. she's a very pretty little girl with a light-up-the room smile.

police will later find that shaniya had only lived at this address since 10-10-09 even though her mother has lived there 6 months. a lunar month and a day later, shaniya is gone. and not back to her aunt carey lockhart-davis (a different davis) or her father bradley lockhart or any of her other caretakers in the upper middle class community she usually called home.
her father had her aunt take her to antoinette's "for the weekend." when carey tries to take shaniya back home, her mother won't let her go. the aunt doesn't have custody and bradley lockhart is away. he's a building contractor, then working in oregon (though he lives in fayetteville, n.c.). friends (the allens) visit shaniya and see cigarette burns on her arms. she says, "mommy's friends did it." I don't know if anyone passed this information to her father, but shockingly, no one calls the police. possibly they fear she'll just be placed in foster care? I don't know...

using dogs, the police quickly determined that shaniya did not walk out of the mobile home at 1116A sleepy hollow drive. yet 30-40 volunteers searched the area using dogs, helicopters, searching neighbors' cars and going door to door. the police find feces on the front porch railing.

next door, ms. moore tells them that she heard noises from antoinette's trailer at 3 a.m. she also saw someone put something in her trashcan. she identifies the feces-cover blanket the officers find as belonging to shaniya.

she may have been one of the people who let police know that antoinette's boyfriend clarence coe took care of shaniya more than her mother. antoinette accuses coe who is arrested 11-11-09 aand released 11-13-09. he has an alibi. he was babysitting his nephew somewhere else. witnesses confirm this.

antoinette has a 7 year old son. when police were called for shaniya, this son was taken from her. there had been child abuse complaints against before and the police see the trailer is, as the landlady says, "a pigsty." it is roped off as a crime scene.

brenda davis, antoinette's sister, also lived in the trailer with her 2-year-old child. she has since been evicted (11-19-09) for not paying rent. she and her mother, ann summers, are the only ones who say antoinette loved shaniya. brenda has a boyfriend, mario andrette macneill.

the amber alert turns up a video surveillance photo of mario carrying shaniya. it was taken at the elevator of comfort suites in sanford, n.c. at 6:11 a.m. on 11-10-09. this is 42 minutes before antoinette calls 911. shaniya appears to be wearing a dress. mario is also carrying something with black and white checks. at 7:30 a.m., mario and shaniya leave the hotel. it's known she's still alive at this point, but it's suspected she is now in worse shape physically than at 6:11. at this time, the amber alert is only 37 minutes long. no one on the scene knows shaniya shouldn't be with mario. the police say they have a person of interest, a 60-year-old man in a blue toyota.

shaniya's body is found, clad only in a t-shirt, on 11-16-09. she is found 100 feet off walker road (33 yards?) across the street from carolina trace, a gated community. she is laying among some deer carcasses (in black plastic trash bags). this location is 6-7 miles from comfort suites. it's on the lee-harnett county line, but on the lee side (shaniya lived in cumberland county). interesting as shaniya's last name could easily have been lockhart. hart means deer. jeff riccio of tarheel canine training inc. found shaniya. he says, "it was nothing anyone wanted to see."

the media have assumed the deer have been left by hunters. I DOUBT it. first, this location is too close to the road and houses to safely hunt. second, I have NEVER heard of a hunter doing such a thing. EVERY hunter I know would take the deer out of the woods. even rich hunters usually aren't so wasteful. they will take the deer to the slaughterhouse to be properly cut up (they will have already field dressed the animal after killing it) and they donate the meat to charity. in my state, leaving a deer like that will get you arrested. also, there are strict bag limits on deer. even if a particularly horrible person goes hunting... why the garbage bags? that's just weird. deer are big animals and a lazy wasteful person would just leave them, not drag them somewhere in a garbage bag.

mario andrette macneill, age 29, turned himself in before shaniya was found. 11 bags of evidence has been taken from his car. on 11-19-09 he's charged with 1st degree murder and 1st degree rape of a child.

antoinette davis was arrested 11-14-09. in court on 11-15-09 her bond was set at $51,000. before shaniya was found, antoinette was charged with human trafficking and felony child abuse including prostitution. additional charges are expected.

grief counselors and chaplains have been called in to work with investigators. these men have 15 and 22 1/2 years in l.e. they've seen murder victims. this case is EXTREMELY bad. the investigation continues...

I have more to post on this. shaniya's photos make one think of a sweet little princess. some very horrible people defiled her. why?