When children go missing it is always heart-wrenching. Such is the case of Asha Degree. The nine year old went missing in the early morning hours from Shelby, North Carolina on Monday February 14, 2000. Valentines Day. A day that should be celebrated for love, happiness and romance is instead remembered for sadness and pain by Asha’s family and friends.
In 2000, Harold and Iquilla Degree lived in Shelby with their two children, O’Bryant, born in 1989, and Asha, born in 1990. It was a rural area west of Charlotte, North Carolina’s capital, with extended family living close by.
Asha was in the fourth grade. The prior weekend was a three-day weekend, with schools closed on Friday, February 11th. Asha and her brother O’Bryant spent that day at their aunt’s house, which was in the same neighborhood, while their parents were still at work. Saturday was filled with youth basketball for both children and Sunday was for church and family.
Like many families in the area, much of the Degrees’ lives revolved around church, family, and school. Harold and Iquilla were protective of their children, and for that reason they didn’t have a family computer in the home to use the still relatively new Internet. Explained Iquila in an interview with Jet magazine in 2013, “We didn’t even have a computer because every time you turned on the TV there was some pedophile who had lured somebody’s child away.”
The children went to bed around 8 pm that Sunday night, February 13th. A car accident in the neighborhood knocked out the power around 9 pm and when the power came on around 12:30 a.m., Asha’s father Harold checked the children’s room and saw both children fast asleep. He himself went to bed around 2:30 a.m. on Monday morning. Before he went to bed, Harold checked in on the children again and saw that they were still asleep.
The next morning is when the family’s nightmare began.
Asha’s mother, Iquilla, recounted that morning in the 2013 Jet magazine interview:
“I woke up on Feb. 14, 2000 at 5:45am. The alarm went off for my children to go to school at 6:30am. I went to the bathroom, two feet away from the door, to start the bath water because they could not take a bath the night before since we had a power outage. I opened their bedroom door. My son O’Bryant was under the covers, as he usually slept. I called his name and he jumped up, as usual. I realized that Asha was not in her bed.”
“I looked beside his bed because sometimes she [Asha] would get up at night and lay there. I asked him where she was. He didn’t know. I checked the couch. I checked downstairs. I checked the kitchen. I checked every closet in the house. I went in my room and put on clothes and told my husband, Harold, that Asha was not in the house. I checked our cars. She was not there. My husband said maybe she was in my mother-in-law’s home— she lives across the road. We called my sister-in-law’s house. She was not there. That’s when I went into panic mode. I heard a car next door. I did not have shoes on. I put shoes on and ran outside. I called my mom and told her that Asha was not in the house. She told me to hang up and call the police. I threw the phone at Harold and went outside.”
A parent’s worse nightmare begins.
Police responded quickly to the scene. They used police dogs to try to track Asha, but with no luck. Iquilla ran around the neighborhood calling for Asha. Friends, family, and members of their church spent the day searching the area to no avail.
Asha’s story was featured in the local news and revealed a puzzling fact. Two different drivers had seen Asha, wearing white pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, walking down a nearby main road around 4 a.m. Monday morning, in torrential rain, carrying her school book bag. One driver, concerned that a young child was out in the storm alone at such an early hour, turned his car around to find out why. When the driver approached Asha, she ran into a nearby wooded area. Puzzled, the driver continued on.
On Tuesday February 15, searchers scoured the area where Asha was seen by the drivers and found a few items. In a shed near the road, searchers found candy wrappers along with a pencil, a green marker and a hair bow that were Asha’s. Disturbingly, searchers also found a photo of an unidentified young Black girl who appeared to be around the same age as Asha.
On Wednesday February 16, her life in a dazed blur, Iquilla discovered that some of Asha’s favorite clothing was missing.
A week later the search was called off. Police and volunteers had scoured an area within a two mile radius from where Asha was last seen. Flyers were posted all over the surrounding area. Hundreds of leads had poured in about possible sightings or abandoned buildings and property where Asha could be. All with no results.
Police were left with a perplexing riddle. Based on all of the information available, it appeared that Asha had packed her bag and left her house under her own power. But why? Was she running away from home? There appeared to be no reason why she would do so. And Asha was much younger than a typical child runaway. Was she going to meet someone?
With no leads, the local police brought in the FBI and North Carolina’s SBI (State Bureau of Investigation). Asha’s family and friends reached out to national media and appeared on the Montel Williams Show to plead for anyone to provide information. Oprah called attention to Asha’s case on her show, as did America’s Most Wanted.
All with no luck.
On August 3, 2001, a year and a half after Asha’s disappearance, there was a possible break in the case. Asha’s book bag and other items were discovered by a construction crew digging an access road for a new home, 30 miles away from Shelby along the same road that Asha was last seen walking. The book bag was found wrapped in a plastic bag. The FBI took the bag and items for testing but didn’t reveal any public information at the time.
Painful years passed for the family with no further information. At the point where Asha ran into the woods 1.3 miles from her home that fateful Valentine’s Day morning, there is now billboard appealing for information about her. Asha’s family hosts an annual walk from their home to the billboard to draw attention to her case.
The search to find Asha continues.
Fifteen years after her disappearance, in February 2015, the FBI, North Carolina’s SBI, and the local sheriff’s office announced that they re-examining every aspect of the case, re-interviewing witnesses, and following new leads to determine exactly what happened to Asha. They also set up a reward of $25,000 to help find Asha and the parties responsible for her disappearance. The sheriff’s office and local community have offered an additional $20,000.
In May 2016, the task force announced that they had a possible new lead. Asha may have been seen getting into a “distinctive vehicle” along the road where Asha was last seen. The car was described as an early 1970s Lincoln Mark IV or Ford Thunderbird, dark green, with rust around the wheel wells. “We encourage anybody out there that if they have any information—no matter how small or minor it may seem—it might be extremely crucial to further us getting one step closer to Asha,” said FBI Special Agent Michael Gregory, who is leading the case now for the FBI.
In September 2017, the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team went to Shelby to assist in the investigation and “provide on-the-ground investigative, technical, behavioral analysis, and analytical support to find out more about what happened to Asha.” Local FBI agents have conducted hundreds of interviews since that time in their investigation.
In October 2018, the local Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office released a Facebook video about two possible clues found in Asha’s book bag in 2001 and asked for any information about them. The first clue is a library book from Fallston Elementary School in Cleveland County, Det. Jordan Bowen said in a video posted by the sheriff’s office.
“If you, or someone you know, had this Dr. Seuss library book around the time of Asha’s disappearance and lost track of it, call us,” Bowen said in the video. Unfortuantely, library records at the Fallston Elementary School Media Center don’t go back to the year of Asha’s disappearance to determine who may have checked the book out, Bowen said.
The second clue is a concert T-shirt from the band New Kids on the Block. The sheriff’s office had a broad request for people who recognize the shirt, asking for calls from anyone who had the shirt or knew someone who may have had the shirt around the time of Asha’s disappearance.
Asha would be grown woman now. Her family has not forgotten her. In addition to the billboard and the annual walk to raise awareness of her case, her family set up a scholarship in her name to help deserving local students.
Her family, and especially her mother Iquilla, have not given up hope. They hope, and they pray, that someday she will be found. But they need answers.
Iquilla has appealed directly to anyone who may have been involved in her daughter’s fate to come forward and unburden themselves. “That’s my prayer every night, that God will get into their heart and let them come forward, because it’s got to be a weight on them,” she said.
“I wouldn't care what I missed. All I want to do is see her.”
“We’re hoping and we’re praying that she’s had a halfway decent life even though we didn’t get to raise her,” she said. “She was 9 years old, and she’ll be 30 this year. So we’ve missed everything. But I don’t care. If she walked in the door right now, I wouldn’t care what I missed. All I want to do is see her.”
See how the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children created the aged photo for Asha
If you or anyone you know has information that could help with Asha’s case, please call the Charlotte, North Carolina FBI office at 704.672.6100.
