Every disappearance has a final moment of certainty, a last sighting, a last call, a last place someone was known to be. The last known tells real true crime cases using only the facts. Today, we are taking on a really tough case. It's a cold case that for almost a quarter century has just haunted North Carolina and really the entire country. We're talking about the disappearance of nine year old Asha Degree. Exactly, and it is a profound mystery. Aja vanished from her family's home in Shelby, North Carolina, in the very early, very dark hours of Valentine's Day, February fourteenth, two thousand. It's one of those cases where the facts just seem to fight each other. You have this shy, cautious little girl who supposedly just walks out of her house all alone, into a cold and stormy night. It doesn't make sense on its face. And our sources for this deep dive they've given us a kind of dual mission today, and we really need to dedicate some serious time to both sides of this. On the one hand, we're going to be dissecting the very recent, very aggressive investigative moves. We're talking specifically about the intense scrutiny on a local family. The dead means they've been the subject of search warrants that were issued as recently as late twenty twenty four and even into early twenty twenty five. So this shows the cases it's anything but dormant, it's. Very much alive. But on the other hand, and this is just as important, we have to contextualize this entire investigation. We're pulling from extensive, very current criminal justice data from North Carolina. Why is that so important because it. Helps us understand the environment, the environment where the original investigation took place and where this current cold case review is unfolding. We're talking about huge systemic challenges unsolved violent crime, how resources get allocated, and the really sobering reality for vulnerable kids in that state. So our goal here, what we're really trying to unpack, is the conflict in the narratives. You have the story presented by the Degree family on that morning back in two thousand and then you have this very complex, very controversial theory is being laid out in these modern search warrants. And through it all, we want to help you understand the massive hurdles. Investigator's face one of cases this high profile, but also this fragmented by time and just so many conflicting details. Okay, so let's start the clock right at the moment of discovery. We're on the morning of February fourteenth, two thousand, Valentine's Day, and. The scene is already a bit unusual. Asha's disappearance happened after a power outage the night before. Some people have speculated that this might have you know, masked the sound of someone either coming into the house or leaving it. Right. So, Asha's mother, a coula degree, She wakes up at five four five am the alarm for the kids to get up and get ready for school that was set for six thirty am, and. That window, that little nine minute period between six thirty am when it goes to wake the children and six thirty nine am, when the nine one one call is actually placed, that nine minutes is just pure chaos. It's defined by this frantic, almost desperate activity, which right from the jump introduced huge complications of the police response. Huge complications. So at six point thirty, Equilla goes in and immediately sees that Asha isn't in her bed. This is the bed she shared with her older brother O'Brien. And her reaction, from all accounts, was just immediate, raw panic. She described basically tearing the house apart. She's checking the couch, She's searching the downstairs area, looking in the kitchen, ripping open every single closet door. She even checks the family cars outside. Right and while Aquilla is in the middle of this frantic search, she wakes up Harold, Asha's father. His first thought, his initial suggestion was that maybe Asha had just gone across the road to his mother's house. A simple explanation, a. Simple logical explanation. So they call a sister in law's house, but nothing. Every quick attempt to find her just fails, and you can feel that hope just evaporating minute by minute. And that's when the private panic becomes very very public. According to interviews, Aquila runs outside at first, she doesn't even have shoes on. She runs back in, throws them on, She talks to a neighbor. She calls her own mother for help, and her mom tells her, you have to call the police now. And this next detail is just so visceral. Equila describes her reaction as just primal. She says she threw the phone at Harold and just ran back outside, screaming Ash's name up and down. The street, which brings us to the nine one one call. Harold places the call at six three nine am, and this is where the narrative for a lot of commentators and even investigators starts to feel unsettling. Deeply unsettling. His phrasing, I'd like to report a child missing. It was described as just so impersonal, so strange. It lacked that raw desperate edge you would just you'd expect it from a parent whose nine year old has just vanished into thin air. Minutes before. I remember reading about that call in the analysis. It immediately drew these comparisons to the infamous Patsy Ramsey nine one one call from back at nineteen ninety six. Yes, exactly. And the issue wasn't just a perceived lack of panic. It was the formality of it. When parent calls nine one one about a missing child, you usually hear an explosion of just uncontrolled fear. Harold's language almost suggested he was reporting an instant, you know, like a fender bender, rather than living through a. Crisis, and that, whether it's fair or not, it immediately started fueling public speculation about the parent's credibility, and. The strange details didn't stop with the poising, not at all. He gives the wrong initial address to the dispatcher. First he says three four oh four, Then he corrects himself to apartment three four oh six. But three four oh six wasn't even their apartment, right, No. That's where his brother LeRoi lived. For police and investigators, you see and address mix up like that isn't just a simple mistake. It immediately suggests one of two things, either an extreme, almost debilitating level of stress, or, as. Some of the darker theories suggest, it's a distraction, a lack of complete focus during what should be the most critical moment of your life. There's also this subtle, but I think really important detail on the call. The dispatcher almost immediately assumes the gender of the child. Right, Harold hasn't said if it's a boy or a girl. He just says a child. Yet the dispatcher asks, okay, is she missing before Harold confirms his asha. So what does that suggest? I mean, maybe there was some prior knowledge from an officer who is already nearby, or a neighbor who had already called something in or maybe it was just something in the way Harold phrased the report that somehow implied the child's identity. It's another little piece that just doesn't quite fit. And then you have the sounds on the call itself. The audio details are contradictory. They are the transcript notes that you can hear crying or talking in the background while Harold's on the phone. But a Quilla's statement is very specific. She said she threw the phone at Harold and was outside screaming Asha's name at that exact moment. So if a Quilla is outside screaming, who is crying or talking inside? Well, O'Bryant the brother, he had been woken up by then it could have been him. But that discrepancy again, it immediately leads to questions about who was actually inside the home and what the true second by second timeline of Arns really was. Okay, but let's get to maybe the most crucial piece of information that Harold gives during that nine one one call. This is the detail that really cemented the initial runaway theory for the police. He tells them her backpack and her pocketbook are missing. The backpack in the pocketbook that suggests she left willingly right, that she packed a bag, that she was prepared to be gone for a little while. It does, but that point immediately created a major contradiction within the family's own narrative. How so, because Iquila later said in interviews that she hadn't noticed the backpack was missing until much later in the day. She said she was in such a state of sheer panics, she just she didn't see it. So Harold noticed it immediately, but Equill it didn't. It was actually O'Brian, the brother, who provided the most detailed observation. He was the one who said he noticed the tweetybird purse and the backpack were gone. He had this very specific detail. He said, Asha kept her bag tight, always hanging in the exact same spot in her closet, so its absence was immediately obvious to him when he woke up. So we have the brother noticing the missing bags, the father reporting the missing on the nine one one call almost instantly, but the mother says she didn't notice them until hours later. It just paints this picture of a family unit under just unimaginable stress, and in that stress, the basic facts of the morning just weren't aligning. But there's a huge omission here, a piece of logic that just doesn't track with the runaway theory. The coat. The coat. She's packing a bag. If she's intending to run away into what was described as a cold, rainy, stormy North Carolina night in February. You think she would take a coat. It's just basic survival instinct. But the striking omission that Harold failed to mention on the call and which was later confirmed, was that Asha's coat was still in the house. So what's the implication of that. Let's break that down. If she left on her own willingly, then not taking a coat is a massive, massive lapse in judgment for a nine year old walking into what were likely near freezing temperature. That if she was taken, if someone her quickly, the missing coat suggests urgency or staging. It suggests something happened so fast that dressing for the weather was either not possible or just wasn't relevant to the person taking her. So for investigators, that one detail, the missing coat, it's crucial. It completely undermines the idea of a prepared runaway, and it leans much more heavily toward the possibility that she was taken from the home. That one detail complicated the entire runaway classification right from the very beginning. All right, So moving away from the chaos of the immediate scene, we get into this period of just deeply contradictory sightings and very strange evidence. This is what really solidified the confusing nature of this case for decades. The timeline of the sightings alone is just, yeah, it's perplexing. It's almost counterintuitive to how you think an investigation should go. It really is. You basically have two key sets of sightings from that morning, and they are separated by hours. The primary sightings, the ones that got the most media attention, were reported by truckers and they saw her allegedly around two thirty am. They placed a child matching Asha's description walking by herself on Highway eighteen, which was four miles from her home. Wait, two point thirty in the morning, four miles from home. Yeah, for a nine year old. That is incredibly early and just an unbelievable distance for a small child to travel alone in the dark. And in a storm. But then hours later, at the time of the nine one one call, So around six thirty am, Harold tells the dispatcher something completely different. He says, the next door neighbor said she went down the road and she said she'd just seen a kid down the road. Okay, let's unpack that timing, because it makes no sense. The neighbor sighting allegedly happened right around the time the parents discovered she was missing. That would suggest she hadn't gone very far at all exactly. So, if a neighbor's telling you they just saw a kid down the road, and you're already in a frantic state, why didn't either parent just sprint down the road to check, especially Equilla, who was already described as running up and down the street screaming Asha's name. That is the precise question that casts so much suspicion around that neighbor sighting. It doesn't add up. If the child was that close and Aquila was out there searching, why didn't the neighbor intervene at six thirty am upon seeing a small child walking alone in the cold rain? And why did we never hear about this sighting? Again, It's like it just vanished from the official narrative. One commentator suggests that the police might have just quickly dismissed the neighbor as being mistaken, or that the sighting itself was just deemed irrelevant compared to the much earlier long distance reports from the truckers on the highway. So the focus quickly shifted back to those two thirty am sightings, the ones from the truckers who saw a little girl in a long sleeved white shirt and dark pants walking against the wind in the rain. And that sighting reinforced the idea that she had left hours before her parents ever noticed. It pushed the timeline back towards an intentional departure, even though the distance she would have had to travel in that weather is just it's baffling, which. Brings us back to this really dificult runaway profile. Asha was nine. She was generally described by everyone as shy, as cautious, a good student. Why on earth would a child like that runaway? Here's where it gets really interesting when you dig into the nuances of her personality. Commentators noted that while she was shy, she also had this known spirited side. What does that mean? Well, she was a fierce basketball player, and apparently she had been foul out of a game shortly before she disappeared and it had deeply, deeply upset her. So that suggests she had a real emotional depth, the capacity for very strong reactions. But does being upset about a basketball game translate into leaving your home in the middle of a storm. That's the leap that's so hard to make. And her mother, Aquila, she insisted that Asha left of her own free will. That was a conclusion that many people found very strange, given her age and just all the circumstances. And what about a note. In so many true runaway cases, you find a note. It's the child's way of explaining their distress. And Asha supposedly loved to write. Yet no runaway note was ever found, which again really complicates the idea that this was an intentional, self initiated departure. And then a full year later, the central piece of physical evidence finally emerges, and it shifts the entire narrative of the case. The backpack. It was recovered off Highway eighteen, about twenty miles north of her home, buried under some construction debris. In the contents. The contents were just so specific and so. Strange, deeply significant. The backpack contained two key items, A doctor Seuss book that was checked out from her local school library. And a new Kids on the Block T shirt that did not belong to her. That shirt is the lynchpin. Why would a nine year old girl in the year two thousand have a shirt from a popular boy band from the late eighties and early nineties and one that wasn't even hers. The discovery just dramatically shifted the entire investigative theory. It moved away from a simple spontaneous runaway event and straight into a potential abduction and grooming. There, law enforcement started to theorize that she might have been lured, lured by someone she knew, or maybe someone driving a green vehicle which was noted by a witness later. On, someone who might have arranged to meet her days in advance, maybe using the promise of a gift like that T shirt. And then the investigation took another turn when they focused on this specific shed location. Inside that shed, investigators down more ambiguous items. They found candy wrappers and a mysterious photo of another unidentified young girl. So now you have this non family T shirt in these items in a shed, and it all suggests this much deeper, much darker context. A context that involves potential grooming, maybe even exploitation, right. And the presence of that photo of another child. It led to this theory that maybe Asha was lured or groomed using another child victim, perhaps the girl in the photo, or maybe by someone connected to that unusual NKOTB shirt, suggesting an adult with you know, connections to the local area and the child's habits, like knowing she went to that life. But we have to be really careful here about the shed items, right, They're not a slam dunk. It is absolutely crucial to note the ambiguity the candy wrappers and the photo. They cannot be directly linked to Asha with any reliable forensic evidence. The only item that her mother mentioned might have been Asha's and was found near that shed was a yellow. Hairbo A single yellow hairbo that is a. Very very thin evidentiary thread to connect the contents of the backpack which was found twenty miles away a year later to this specific remote location. That ambiguity is what makes building a watertight case so incredibly challenging even all these years later. And that brings us right up to the present day. I mean, for twenty five years, this case has been cold, but the reason activity proves that authorities are aggressively pursuing a very specific lead. This includes two really high profile search horrants. One was issued in September of twenty twenty four and another just recently in February of twenty twenty five, and they are specifically targeting one family. The Deadman's warrants they implicated the parents Roy and Connie Deadman and also their daughters Lizzie, Grace, Sarah, and Ennilye Deadman. And it's so vital for you, the listener, to understand the legal framework here. The theories that are presented in a search warrant. They're put forward to establish probable cause. What does that mean exactly? It means they have to show a reasonable basis to search or to investigate. It does not require the very high standard of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It's a much lower bar. Okay. So what's the core of the theory? What did the warrants lay out? The core of the investigative theory as it's presented in those warrants, it centers on the alleged involvement of the Deadman family, and police are focusing on two things, a specific vehicle and some alleged forensic evidence. The vehicle, they theorized it was a nineteen sixty four amc Rambler registered to the father Roy Deadman. Yes, But the spokesperson for the Deadmon family, a man named Skip Foster, he has come out very aggressively and very publicly to challenge the foundational evidence that's presented in those warrants. And his argument starts with the vehicle itself, right. It starts with the most basic conflict, the description of the vehicle. Eyewitnesses back in two thousand, they originally described a nineteen seventies green Link and Thunderbird. That is a substantially different car, different make, different model, different decade from the nineteen sixty four amc Rambler that the police are now focusing on. That feels like a fundamental problem for establishing probable cause. If your original eyewitness accounts, the ones that define the suspect's vehicle for years, are so drastically different from the one ye're now linking to a suspect, that immediately introduces a huge amount of doubt about that vehicle's involvement. It's a massive discrepancy. But the vehicle description isn't even the biggest problem when it comes to the timeline, Foster highlighted something that's frankly critical the transfer date of that AMC rambler, the one mentioned in the affidavits. It was flawed, flawed. How it happened one month after Usha's disappearance in February of two thousand. Wait a minute, so you're saying the official record show that Roy Deadman didn't even own own the car at the time Oshwa was abducted. According to Foster, the transfer didn't happen until March of two thousand. So if the affidavit for the search warrant included a detail that fundamentally undermines the vehicle's supposed involvement, namely that the suspect didn't officially own it yet, how did that warran get signed. Does that suggest it a lack of rigor in the probable cause presentation or were they just relying on other evidence so heavily that they overlooked this massive gap. It suggests the investigators must have been leaning very heavily on other non chronological evidence, mostly likely witness testimony or the alleged DNA connection. We're about to get to, but from a legal perspective, the defense now has this immediate huge hole they can poke in the Warren's credibility. Foster calls it a big problem because it just critically compromises the link between Roy Deadman and the initial abduction event. Okay, so let's move to the other pillar of their case, the DNA evidence. Right, Ann only Deadman, one of the daughters, who would have been thirteen years old at the time of the disappearance. The warrant alleges that her DNA was found in aush's backpack. In Foster the stokes person, he questions the validity and the relevance of this connection. Of course, and this brings us into the very complex world of applying modern forensic science to very old, very cold cases. The use of hair and environmental DNA, especially decades later, is incredibly problematic. What do you mean by that, Well, when forensic experts talk about hair DNA, they always emphasize that it is notoriously hit or miss for definitively placing someone at a scene. Why because hair and tiny DNA samples are just so easily transferable. To make that really accessible for you listening, we have to remember that a single hair like say, a direct preserved blood sample. It can transfer through anything, through clothing, car seeds, shared spaces, even just through the air. It's the difference between finding the person themselves at the crime scene versus finding some residue they might have left days earlier somewhere else, which was then passively transferred onto the item in question. For investigators, that DNA is really only meaningful if it can be backed up by other robust direct evidence linking the deadmen's to the timeline of the abduction. If it stands alone, as Foster suggests it does, he calls it a pretty thin connection. And the warrants also relied heavily on witness testimonies, but even those are reportedly contradictory. There's a witness named Thad Melonchimee who claimed he heard one of the deadman daughters confess at a party. A party confession sounds flimsy, it can be. And on the other side, you have a witness named Micky Cooper who reportedly provided information that completely contradicts the police's theory, suggesting there are other avenues the police should have been pursuing all along. And there's more. Skip Foster, the spokesperson he stressed that certain exculpatory evidence was left out of the warrants. What's exculpatory evidence, It's information that would tend to clear the subjects of guilt or at least complicate the narrative of their guilt. Specifically, he says that Connie Deadman, the mother, and Sarah Deadman, another daughter, both passed polygraph tests when they were questioned about the disappearance. And that detail was omitted from the warrant application. That's what he claims, and that omission is legally very contentious. Now, polygraph tests are almost never admissible in court, but they are very commonly used in investigations to help gauge a person's credibility. So by leaving out the fact that two key subjects pass their tests from a document that's designed to establish probable cause to investigate them further, the police are essentially presenting an incomplete picture to the judge signing the warrant. And the defense would view that as an attempt to stack the deck right to build a narrative for probable cause that only includes the incriminating evidence while ignoring the context that might weaken their request for a search. Precisely and then finally you have these text exchanges between the dead men's sisters. In them, they revealed fears about their father's potential implication in the case. The police won't see that as an admission of guilt. Schoster interprets those messages completely differently. He says they're not admissions of guilt or knowledge, but are actually entirely plausible reactions to decades of intense police pressure and the shock of suddenly being named in these high profile search warrants. And the family is unified. They are maintaining their innocence and are publicly addressing the investigation, which is a very unusual move for suspects who are under this kind of intense scrutiny. And what's so fascinating here is that while we're completely immersed in these granular, ambiguous details of the asha degree investigation, the confusing nine to one one call, the ambiguous DNA, the vehicle controversy, this one long unsolved mystery, it really brings into sharp relief these massive systemic trends within the criminal justice system as a whole, and particularly in North Carolina. North Carolina is the stage for this tragedy, right, and this states incredibly high volume of unsolved violent crime provides some really crucial context for why a case, even one that gets as much national at tension as I should degrees, can just languish for twenty five years. Let's look at the data. We have numbers from twenty twenty two. The violent crime rate in North Carolina stood at four hundred and five per one hundred thousand residents. As it compared to the rest of the country. It was notably six percent higher than the national average, which was three hundred and eighty one per hundred thousand. It's a little higher, a little higher, but that rate isn't just high. It has been rapidly escalating and it's outpacing the rest of the nation. Between twenty twelve and twenty twenty two, violent crime actually increased by fifteen percent in North Carolina. Wow, And what was the national trend during that time? If you contrast that with the national trend, the US actually saw a two percent decrease in violent crime during that same decade. The implication there is pretty significant. So, just based on that data, that fifteen percent crime increase, it suggests a severe and growing strain on the resources of local police forces in that state. That's exactly it. If the volume of violent crime is rising that dramatically in your state while it's decreasing nationally, it means you your local departments are constantly being pulled toward immediate, fresh cases, and that directly limits the personnel and the funding they can dedicate to cold cases like hashes. And the data on homicide specifically is even more concerning for the state's resources. Homicide increase sharply by sixty four percent in North Carolina during that twenty twelve to twenty twenty two period. Sixty four percent. Yes, And when fresh homicides are consuming all of your major investigative resources, your cold case units, they struggle immensely to get the dedicated time they need for these complex, decades old forensic reviews. And it's not just violent crime. The sheer volume of property crime over two thousand per TWE hundred thousand and twenty twenty two is six percent higher than the US national average. All of this high volume crime just requires so much law enforcement time and it diverts attention from the few but highly complex unsolved missing persons cases. So this all raises a really important question. In a high volume crime environment like that, how effective is the system at actually solved crimes, and the. Data shows a persistent struggle, right it does. In twenty twenty two, a significant sixty five percent of violent crimes in North Carolina were not solved or cleared. As they say, that's compared to sixty two percent nationally. So North Carolina struggles just a little bit more than the average state and clearing these cases, which means there is a larger and larger backlog of unresolved violence. When you drill down on specific crimes, does it get worse? It gets dark. Robbery, which is a violent offense that usually involves witnesses or physical evidence, was the violent crime that was least frequently solved in North Carolina in twenty twenty two. A massive seventy one percent of robberies went unsolved. Seventy one percent. That just underscores the systemic difficulty of achieving clearance even on cases that have fresh leads. So for a cold case like ashes, which relies on decades old, ambiguous evidence, the difficulty is just multiplied exponentially. And shifting back for a moment, back to that original runaway narrative, it's so important to contextualize the true vulnerability of runaways and what are called thrown away children back in the era of Asha's disappearance. Right you're talking about the Nismart two study. Exactly, the National Incident Studies of missing, abused, runaway and thrown away children, and it was conducted right around that time, from nineteen ninety seven to nineteen ninety nine. Can you clarify for us the difference between a runaway and a thrown away child as defined by that study. I think that distinction is really crucial for you to understand. Absolutely. A runaway is a child who leaves home without permission, usually intending to stay away. A thrown away child, as defined by the study, is a child who is explicitly told to leave home or is just abandoned by their caretaker. So the distinction is about the child's agency in the departure. It is, and it frames the level of immediate danger therein. The numbers from that study are just staggering. Niesmart Iwi estimated that one million, six hundred and eighty two thousand, nine hundred young people had a runaway or thrown away episode in nineteen ninety nine alone. That is an immense population of vulnerable children, and a. Huge portion of those children were considered truly at risk. Over one point one million, or seventy one percent, were estimated to be endangered. It's so easy to talk about these kids as statistics, but when you realize that Asha, at nine years old, was part of that most vulnerable group, it just makes the failure to find her that much more devastating. What were the main factors for being considered endangered? Well, endangerment factors included physical or sexual abuse or the fear of abuse if they returned home. That was the most common factor at twenty one percent of these endangered kids. Others included things like substance dependency at nineteen percent, or just being extremely young. And Asha falls into that category. She falls squarely into that last category. Eighteen percent of endangered youth were thirteen or younger. Asha was nine. This shows that if she did leave of her own free will for any reason at all, known or unknown, she was immediately classified among the highest risk group of children in the entire country. And what's also striking is how few of these incidents actually result in law enforcement getting involved. This study found that only twenty one percent of all runaways and thrownaways were even reported missing to the authorities to help locate them, and even more shocking, sixty eight percent of caretakers did not contact the police at all. Why not often because they either knew where the child was or they just didn't think police involvement was necessary. So this is vital context. If Asha really did lease on her own her situation a young black female child in a high crime state, it immediately placed her at immense risk. And the lack of clear context in those first few hours, combined with her parents conflicting initial story, it just ensured the investigation began with massive ambiguity, and that made it hard to dedicate the maximum resources right when they were needed the most. And finally, we just have to look at the criminal justice system in North Carolina through the critical lens of racial disparity. This is particularly relevant given that Asher Degree is a black child. The data really highlights the different outcomes for victims and offenders based on race in that state. The statistics are pretty clear, aren't they They are. In twenty twenty two, black people were victims of violent crime at a rate three point five times higher than the white violent victimization rate in North Carolina. That disparity in just being exposed to victimization, it creates a much higher burden on the community. And that disparity it extends to the enforcement side of things as well. Yes, black people were arrested for violent crimes that are rate four point nine times higher than white people, and this of course contributes to the disparity you see in the correctional system where black adults in North Carolina are three point six times more likely to be in prison compared to white adults. But the most tragic and the most relevant disparity for this particular case is what we see nationally in unsolved cases. National data from twenty twenty one shows that homicides of black victims were twice as likely to go unsolved as homicides of white victims. All of these systemic challenges, the high crime rates, the low clearance rates, the inherent racial disparities, they form this complex, challenging backdrop against which the asha degree case continues to be investigated, and it potentially affects the priority and the sustained resources that get dedicated to achieving justice for victims of color. This case just remains a devastating study in conflicting narratives. We started with that chaotic morning, the family's high stress, very confusing initial account. The unusual formality of that nine to one one call compared to the mother's frantic screaming outside. Harold's immediate knowledge of the missing bags, and then that strange critical absence of a coat in freezing, stormy weather, and. That confusion just extended to the evidence. You have that bizarre mismatch in time between the two thirty am trucker sightings and the six first three eight am neighbor sighting. The mysterious new kids on the Block shirt in the library book found a year later, suggesting this dark grooming scenario, and then the ambiguous shed evidence that provided almost no forensic certainty at all. And now in the present day, you have this highly controversial modern investigation targeting the Debin family based on search warrants that have just been aggressively challenged by their spokesperson. Challenge because of the significant vehicle discrepancy, the questionable date of ownership. Transfer, and the inclusion of this disputed DNA evidence right alongside the omission of the fact that two of them passed polygraph tests. The complexities here just underscore the importance of allowing the judicial process to unfold transparently, just as the Deadman family spokesperson urged without succumbing to this premature public judgment that's based solely on the very selective narrative of a probable cause warrant. At the end of the day, we want the truth to come to light, regardless of who that truth implicates, and we want Asha to be found. You know, if we look back at that Nismart study, the sheer volume of runaway and thrown away children almost one point seven million in that one year, is just immense. Yet the vast majority of those children, ninety nine point six percent of them, they returned home to their families or were located within that study year. So what does the failure to find Usha Degree after all this time and all this scrutiny tell us not just about this one particular crime, but about the systemic challenges facing that tiny remaining fraction of missing children, that persistent point four percent who never ever return. Especially when you factor in the persistent struggle that North Carolina has in clearing violent cases and addressing the racial disparities in who becomes a victim. It suggests that the investigative gaps where these most vulnerable children vanished are not just isolated incidents, but maybe they're deep seated challenges within a strained system, challenges that often only surface when a case like Asha Degrees forces us all to look a little closer. And we have to ask, for every high profile case like this one, how many other vulnerable children vanish without ever receiving this level of sustained attention. This was the last known. The facts are limited, the record ends where the answers disappear. Until more is known, this case remains unresolved.