It’s been nearly nine years since a 15-year-old honor student went missing—and her family says the case has gone cold—but they’re still asking authorities to keep the investigation into her disappearance open.
Relatives of Yasmin Acree held hands and prayed at a vigil outside the missing teen’s family home Tuesday in the city’s South Austin neighborhood.
“Our family has hope that one day she will return,” Shakelia Johnson said.
Acree went missing from that same home on Jan. 15 in 2008. Her adoptive mother, Rose Starnes, who died in 2014, said at the time she believed Yasmin had been abducted. Chicago police did not respond to questions about the investigation.
“We started thinking then, maybe somebody got her,” Starnes said.
A few years ago suspicions fell on accused child rapist Jimmie Terrell Smith who lived in Acree’s building and, according to the Chicago Tribune, had been mentioned in her personal diary.
The Rev. Ira Acree said he was in a 2013 meeting with Smith in Cook County Jail where Smith confessed to helping Yasmin Acree commit suicide.
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“He said ‘I didn’t want to get blamed for it,’” Ira Acree said. “’For her death, she committed suicide, so I took her body and I put it in a garbage can—set it on fire.’”
Her family is still not certain if she is dead or alive.
“Every day kids are getting killed, every day, but what about the missing kids, what about the families that are still hurting because they have no answers,” Johnson said.
Acree’s family is offering a $10,000 reward in exchange for new information.
