SUMTER, South Carolina—Police said they now think a missing 5-year-old girl in South Carolina was killed the same time as her mother.
Sumter Police spokeswoman Tonyia McGirt said on Tuesday, Aug. 6 that 28-year-old Daunte Maurice Johnson is trying to help police find 5-year-old Nevaeh Lashy Adams’s body.
Authorities said Johnson was arrested Monday after he was seen running away from a Sumter apartment where a family member found the mother, 29-year-old Sharee Bradley, dead. Police haven’t said how she was killed.
McGirt said it appears both the mother and child were killed at the same time, several hours before Bradley’s body was found.
McGirt said in a statement Johnson is also a suspect in a homicide in Missouri, but didn’t provide details.
Missing Children
There were 424,066 missing children reported in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in 2018, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.Under federal law, when a child is reported missing to law enforcement they must be entered into the database. In 2017, there were 464,324 entries.
“This number represents reports of missing children. That means if a child runs away multiple times in a year, each instance would be entered into NCIC separately and counted in the yearly total. Likewise, if an entry is withdrawn and amended or updated, that would also be reflected in the total,” the center noted.
The center said it assisted officers and families with the cases of more than 25,00 missing children. In those cases, 92 percent were endangered runaways, 4 percent were family abductions, 3 percent were critically missing young adults between the ages of 17 and 21, 1 percent were lost, injured, or otherwise missing children, and less than one percent were nonfamily abductions.
The center was founded by John and Revé Walsh and other child advocates in 1984 as a private, non-profit organization to serve as the national clearinghouse and resource center for information about missing and exploited children.
