Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  Shakira didn’t hold a high school diploma, and getting a job without one wasn’t easy; potential employers seemed nervous when she mentioned she was trans, then didn’t call. Sage and Aubrey were harassed on the street, called slurs, once chased by a crowd. Sage’s jobs paid minimum wage, and neither Miss Cookie nor Sage’s dad, Dean, had a lot of cash to spare.

  Dean had been incarcerated for several years on a drug charge when Sage was young, but now he was eager to play a bigger role in Sage’s life. He struggled to accept Sage, first as a gay man and then as a trans woman, but a Lifetime movie called Prayers for Bobby changed his mind. “Dude was like that and his family dropped him. I just felt I couldn’t do that to my child,” Dean said. “When she walked by on the street and I was at the barbershop with my boys, I would say, ‘Come here, I want you to meet my child.’”

  Sage wasn’t a stranger to interpersonal trouble. Her Facebook account shows messages from March 2012 in which a friend is telling her to “watch her back,” that people on the street had it out for her because she’d contacted the wife of a man she’d hooked up with. Occasionally, Sage also placed Casual Encounters ads on Craigslist, a practice Shakira didn’t approve of. This is how police believe Sage met Erik McFadden.

  NOVEMBER 19, 2012, WAS A MONDAY, AND SHAKIRA’S 19TH birthday. The friend group celebrated Shakira in style at the apartment. But then a girl came busting through the door wanting to start a fight with one of Sage’s friends over a man. The fight migrated outside. There were cars parked all the way up Sage’s street. Then car doors opened and a crowd of people tumbled out. In the fray, Sage ended up fighting with a man named Jamel Smith, an acquaintance whom Sage had seen around town. Things escalated and someone called the police.

  Police responded at about 11:20 p.m. and Jamel Smith filed a report that Sage damaged his car, but no one was arrested. Shakira said fights were not unheard-of in their circle, but that something about this one felt different.

  “Where did it come from? It didn’t start with Sage or me,” she said. “So it was kinda weird how it ended up on Sage.”

  Later that night, Jamel Smith tweeted: “Been disrespected to the point of no return.”

  After the cops left, Shakira called a couple of friends from her hometown of Norfolk, Virginia, and they came at dawn and drove her back with them to the coast. Shakira didn’t intervene on Sage’s behalf in the fight; Sage felt let down and angry.

  “Her last words to me were ‘I hate you,’” Shakira said. “We never got to make it right.”

  Sage woke up late the next day and called her dad. She congratulated him on the anniversary of his getting out of jail and asked him for money to get her hair braided.

  Sage’s other roommate, Aubrey Carson, said that Sage woke him up from a nap when she left and told him simply that she was off to meet a man. When Aubrey woke again around eight p.m., the house was black. He called Sage’s phone, but it went straight to voicemail.

  “Major red flag,” Aubrey said. “Sage would charge [her] phone anywhere.” In the morning, Sage still was not back.

  When the phone rang at around nine a.m., Shakira thought it was Sage calling to apologize. But it was Aubrey. Shakira told Aubrey to call Miss Cookie, who told Aubrey to call the police.

  Miss Cookie remembers receiving this call, which detonated a bomb at the center of her life.

  “The police came to the house and talked to us,” she said. “I told them what I have been saying all along: Sage would never leave her family right before Thanksgiving and not tell anyone. Somebody must have taken her.”

  Aubrey called the Charlottesville Police Department on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 21. He said the officer on the line sounded calm, simply asked for Sage’s name, birth date, and a picture.

  “From the start, it seemed like they didn’t see it very seriously,” Aubrey said.

  Detectives began investigating on Thursday, November 22—Thanksgiving Day. The case was originally assigned to Detective Sergeant Marc Brake, who has not returned multiple requests for comment.

  Dean and Latasha Grooms, Sage’s mother, both confirmed that it was extremely out of character for Sage’s phone to go to voicemail and for her not to have been in touch with family or friends for 36 hours. Detectives also spoke to the friend who confirmed she had seen Sage walking west on Main Street just after 6:30 p.m. on November 20, that the two had stopped to chat, and that Sage had said she was “going to meet a man.”

  Two additional detectives were brought on board who would stay with Sage’s case for years. Lieutenant James Mooney is a big man just a few years shy of retirement with a close-shaven head who favors logo-free gray sweatshirts, belted blue jeans, and black sneakers. Detective Ronald Stayments is a second-generation cop but with a slicker look—pink tie on pink shirt, handcuffs that dangle from his dress pants.

  Six CPD officers conducted a “grid search” of the busy commercial corridor, checking trash cans, dumpsters, open lots, parking lots, and fields for any signs of Sage, as well as checking nearby businesses for any surveillance footage. The only camera was a traffic camera, but it only monitors, it doesn’t record.

  On Friday, with Sage missing for 72 hours, Mooney got ahold of Sage’s cell phone records, which showed that Sage talked to a friend from northern Virginia for about 20 minutes on the day of her disappearance, but the last call Sage’s phone received was at 6:36 p.m. from an unidentified number. After that call, all activity on Sage’s phone stopped.

  To identify the unknown number, the detectives gave it to Sage’s family. Dean posted it to his Facebook page, and before long he received a message from an acquaintance named Yami Ortiz, a trans woman who moved in similar circles as Sage. I know that number, she said. That’s Erik McFadden.

  Sage’s phone records reveal that the two had been exchanging texts and calls for several weeks before Sage’s disappearance, that they had met multiple times for sex, and that McFadden may have already given Sage some money in exchange for Sage not outing him to his girlfriend.

  Years of living in Charlottesville and being stopped, sometimes seemingly at random, by the CPD had left a bitter taste in Dean Smith’s mouth, and the slow start out of the gate made Dean suspicious.

  “I felt they were lying to us on the whole,” Dean said. “I did my own investigation.”

  Dean learned that McFadden worked at a Sherwin-Williams paint store and lived in downtown Charlottesville with his girlfriend. Dean also posted McFadden’s picture to Facebook.

  “That really set us back a long way,” said Mooney, who believes that Dean posting that picture spooked McFadden into fleeing. “If we’d have had a chance to find him without his picture being out there, we might be talking to him instead of looking for him.”

  At the same time, Sage’s family wonders why they as civilians had more information about the case than the police did at that point.

  “All their information came from us,” Miss Cookie said, also referring to efforts undertaken by Sage’s aunt Tonita Smith, who found McFadden’s Facebook profile and, being able to access Sage’s Facebook and Twitter, began checking them for clues. “It began to feel like we were doing their job for them.”

  On Saturday, November 24, after conducting a search of Sage’s neighborhood, the Charlottesville Police Department got another call about a missing person. This time, it was a young woman named Esther Ayeni. She said she had not heard from her boyfriend, Erik McFadden, who had been staying in her apartment while she was out of town for Thanksgiving. CPD detectives told Ayeni that they were actually already looking for McFadden to question him about his role in Sage’s disappearance. McFadden’s job confirmed he had not shown up to work in several days with no explanation and no warning.

  The investigation seemed to have gone dark over the weekend. “I don’t think they really did enough at that time,” Shakira said. “Instead of calling people, they should have been getting people in investigating rooms and interrogating them.”

  On
Monday, CPD officers talked at length with Ayeni. She had finally gotten a call and emails from McFadden the previous night, Sunday, November 25—he told Ayeni he was in Washington, DC, and needed money. She told him that the police wanted to speak to him about Sage Smith and gave him contact information for the detectives.

  Police entered Ayeni’s apartment looking for McFadden. He wasn’t there, but they collected McFadden’s stuff from her apartment, including his laptop computer and clothes. A receipt from CVS showed that he had been in Charlottesville until as recently as the evening of Thursday, November 22, two days after Sage went missing.

  On Tuesday, November 27, with Sage missing for a week, detectives got a call from McFadden himself. Yes, McFadden explained, I was supposed to meet Sage near the Amtrak station that day, but she never showed up, and I don’t know what happened to her. He was in New York now, he told detectives. Why? “Because I’ve never been to New York before,” McFadden responded. Detective Marc Brake told McFadden that he should to return to Charlottesville. McFadden hung up.

  On Wednesday, November 28, Charlottesville police officers searched the streets and wooded areas along West Main street, where Sage was last seen, and then they expanded their search to include the area around where McFadden had been living.

  The next day, Esther Ayeni told police that McFadden was taking a bus to Charlottesville arriving the next evening and that he expected to be picked up by police. The police affidavit reads, “Brake reasonably assumed, based on the email communication, that McFadden would be speaking with him at that time to explain his absence from Charlottesville and his relationship with Smith.”

  But that’s not how it turned out. On Friday, November 30, while coming back from a visit to a trash expert that helped them determine that the dumpsters behind McFadden’s apartment went to a landfill some 60 miles away in Henrico County, near Richmond, detectives heard again from Esther Ayeni. McFadden was going to run.

  “[I]m heading out,” McFadden wrote to Ayeni in an email on November 30. “This is what happened i never did anything sexual with that guy and he was blackmailing me, he wanted me to give him money not to lie from saying we did and i did and he agreed to stop and then the next time he hit me up for money i said no . . . we did meet up but he had alot of enemies me and him were walking and some people sowed up and i kept walking not looking back.”

  In other words, McFadden did in fact meet up with Sage. Police obtained warrants for McFadden’s computer, email accounts, cell phone apps, Twitter, and bank records. Another email to Ayeni in May of 2013 from an untraceable email address is the last anyone has heard from Erik McFadden.

  That December, police made two more efforts to find Sage. On the first, Charlottesville police, in conjunction with officers from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and cadaver-sniffing dogs from the Virginia Search and Rescue Dog Association, again searched the areas around Main Street and McFadden’s house as well as nearby railroad tracks and near a deep sediment pond. A dog made a “slight indication” that they picked up Sage’s scent.

  A dive team was called in to search the pond, but nothing turned up. The final attempt was a large-scale search of that Henrico landfill that involved Charlottesville police officers as well as officers from Henrico County, forensic and hazmat personnel, and a retired special agent specializing in landfill searches. But they found nothing.

  Over the past four years, Sage’s case has stayed “under active investigation.” In January of 2013, detectives met with agents from the FBI and US Marshals Service to see if they might be able to consult or provide assistance. In May of 2013, they got in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Later that month, dental records for Sage were obtained and placed into a national registry. A few tips came in that Sage might be living in the Tidewater area or in the Carolinas. They went nowhere.

  ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2014, A WHITE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA sophomore named Hannah Graham went missing from Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Within 24 hours, the Virginia State Police had taken over the case.

  By September 15, nearly every law enforcement office in central Virginia knew Graham’s name and dozens of officers were searching. Then the FBI came on board, as well as the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Office, the Blue Ridge Mountain Search Group, and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. More than 5,000 tips flooded in, necessitating a separate Hannah Graham tip line. Police announced a $50,000 reward for information, $10,000 of which came from the city of Charlottesville itself (the reward pool would later total $100,000). A massive volunteer search drew more than 1,000 participants from all over the state.

  In the early hours and days of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, Charlottesville police chief Tim Longo gave several press conferences during which he shook his fist, banged the lectern, and wiped away tears.

  Communications Officer Captain Gary Pleasants was sending 146 members of the international press updates more than once per day.

  Detective Mooney was also the lead detective on Graham’s abduction case. Law enforcement officers from all over the country were calling offering help—did Mooney need trucks? Helicopters? A drone? The CPD declined to disclose the total amount spent on the search, but it has been called the most extensive and intensive in Virginia state history. “Ungodly amounts of overtime dollars,” Mooney said.

  The suspect in Hannah Graham’s case fled as well, triggering a national manhunt that located the fugitive in Texas in three days. Hannah’s remains were found after 36 days, and the suspect pleaded guilty in spring of 2016. He will spend the rest of his life in jail.

  “HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL?” DEAN SMITH WANTS TO know. “I watched the helicopters come right up and over the field there behind my house. They didn’t do that for my child.”

  Hundreds of thousands of people are reported missing each year, but most of them are found. Key factors distinguish these ordinary missing from the truly gone, and it falls to law enforcement, who have finite time and resources, to tell the difference, and quickly. Every expert says that the choices law enforcement makes in the first 72 hours determine the outcome. In Hannah’s case, every choice was made correctly. In Sage’s, many of them were not.

  The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services has clear protocol as of 2015 for high-risk missing persons cases (though no such document existed in 2012; when called for comment, the CPD declined to do so). The protocol includes making requests for search and rescue and other external support “in the early hours of the investigation.”

  Yet the detectives did not make requests for substantive external support in this case until December 1, 2012, 11 days after Sage went missing. Detective Mooney said the Virginia State Police and the US Marshals were consulted, and that the FBI offered technical assistance to find McFadden. When contacted this February, the first two agencies said they never had any agents working on Sage’s case nor are they actively assisting on it now.

  Protocol also advises police officers to contact local government and trash companies to request a delay in trash collection near where the subject was last seen or might have been abducted. CPD did not request any such delays. Finally, protocol advises detectives to get consent or obtain search warrants for emails, chats, and “other online communications” for clues relevant to the disappearance and to communicate frequently and openly with the victim’s family.

  Police did file for a warrant to search the email files associated with Sage’s phone as well as the laptop they seized from McFadden’s apartment—but not until March 11, 2013, nearly four months after Sage’s disappearance. Miss Cookie states that she had to call and leave messages for several days, even during the first week of the investigation, in order to receive a return phone call from lead CPD detective Marc Brake.

  Aubrey Carson, who called about Sage’s disappearance, was not contacted until “three or four days, maybe longer” after Sage went missing. Aubrey was staying with his grandmother 20 minutes north of town. Dete
ctives asked Aubrey to come down to the police station. Aubrey agreed, but because he didn’t have a car, he asked to be picked up at his grandmother’s home. The detective agreed. But no officers ever showed. Aubrey was not interviewed for nearly two more weeks.

  When interviewed in January of 2016 in her home on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, Shakira said detectives had never talked to her beyond a short factual phone call. Mooney said he and Stayments had been meaning to go up to see her but that his desk duty, which he had for most of 2015 due to a knee injury, had prevented it.

  A final point of misstep was police communication with the public. On November 28, with Sage missing for eight days and detectives searching the areas around McFadden’s apartment, CPD Lieutenant Ronnie Roberts called the first press conference about Sage’s case.

  “It’s not a criminal case,” the lieutenant told the gathered reporters, nearly all local or regional. “We have nothing at this point in time that indicates it being a criminal case, which makes it difficult to get warrants and things of that sort, because you have to have a criminal case to go in that direction.”

  “I don’t know why he said that,” Mooney said recently. “He was our public information officer. He should have asked for the public’s help.”

  Mooney said the case was clearly criminal since November 30 when McFadden sent the email to his girlfriend admitting to meeting with Sage. “At that point, this obviously wasn’t a missing persons case anymore—something had happened,” Mooney said. In the police affidavit for a warrant to search McFadden’s computer, Lieutenant Mooney wrote, “These facts when considered together present probable cause to believe that [Sage] Smith has been abducted, is either being held against [her] own will or has met with harm.” The search warrant was granted; the charge was criminal abduction.