Asha Jaquilla Degree, disappeared February 14, 2000, Shelby, North Carolina.
Asha (pronounced Ay-sha) Jaquilla Degree, 9, disappeared from Shelby, North Carolina in the early hours of February 14, 2000.
She packed her bookbag and left her family home north of the city and began walking along nearby North Carolina Highway 18, despite a storm that morning with heavy rain and wind.
Why she left, when she did in the midst of a storm with pouring rain is the subject of much debate. Running away from home at this stage is unusual and if she was being abused by someone either inside or outside the family, there was no evidence discovered of this.
Several passing truckers saw her on Highway 18 and when one of them approached her to check she was okay, around 1 mile from her home, she ran away into a wooded area. Later that morning, her parents discovered she had left the house and immediately contacted the authorities to report her missing.
An intensive search that began that day led to the location of some of her belongings in a tool shed near the highway a few days after she vanished.
A year and a half later, on August 3, 2001, Asha’s school bookbag, was discovered on a construction site along Highway 18 north of Shelby in Morganton, double wrapped in black bags. Over 20 years since Asha vanished and apart from the bookbag, there have been further clues to the disappearance of the 9-year-old girl from Shelby.
In 2016 and 2018, the FBI released new evidence after a reinvestigation started in 2015, but many questioned why it took so long to be made public after the disappearance. Despite this new evidence, it remains a cold case.
Who was Asha Degree?
Asha Jaquilla Degree, was born on August 5, 1990, and was of African-American descent. She was the daughter of Harold and Iquilla Degree, who married on Valentine's Day in 1988, with a brother called O'Bryant.
She had black hair, brown eyes and she was 4'6" and weighed 60 pounds.
She lived in a small apartment on Oakcrest Drive an area north of Shelby, North Carolina, on the western edge of the Charlotte metropolitan area.
It was said that Asha was cautious, shy, scared to death of dogs and the dark.
Asha's fourth-grade class at Fallston Elementary School read the book, “The Whipping Boy”, by Sid Fleischman in February 2000. The book tells the story of a prince and a commoner child who receives lashes on the royal's behalf every time he did something wrong. The children run away in the story and the book covers their adventures. Both boys return safely to the kingdom at the story's end. It is not known if the book served as a catalyst for Asha's disappearance.
The prelude to the disappearance
Asha was in fourth grade at the nearby Fallston Elementary School and it was closed on Friday, February 11 so her brother and she spent the day at their aunt's house in the same neighborhood.
From there they went to their basketball practice at their school and on February 12, Asha's basketball team lost its first game of the season. Her parents recalled that she was somewhat upset about this, crying along with her teammates afterward, but seemed to have gotten over it and watched her brother's game afterward.
The disappearance of Asha Degree
On Sunday, February 13, 2000, a Sunday, the children went to church from a relative's house and then returned home. Around 8-8.30 pm, both children went to bed in the room they shared.
Between 9 pm and 12.30 am the next day, the power went out in the neighborhood after a car accident hit a powerline. Harold checked on his children and saw both Asha and O'Bryant asleep in their beds and he checked on them again shortly before he went to bed at 2.30 a.m. on February 14 and saw both of them asleep.
Shortly after this, 10-year-old, O'Bryant, heard Asha's bed squeak and he may have seen her standing in their room. Thinking she had just gone to use the restroom, he took no notice and went back to sleep. Apparently, Asha must have got out of bed around that time, taking her bookbag she had previously packed with several sets of clothes and personal items, and left the house.
Between 3.45 and 4.15 am, a truck driver and a motorist saw Asha walking south along Highway 18, wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt and white pants, just north of its junction with Highway 180. They reported these sightings but only after they had seen news reports of Asha’s disappearance later in the day.
Iquilla Degree woke at 5.45 am to get the children ready for school. She went to the children’s room to wake them up at around 6.30 am and call them to take a bath, but O'Bryant was in his bed, Asha was nowhere to be seen.
Asha’s father, Harold, thought Asha might have gone over to his mother's house across the street but when Iquilla went there, she was not there. Iquilla then called her mother, who told her to immediately call the police.
All the doors to the house were found locked, but Asha kept her house key in the bookbag indicating that no one had forced entry into the house and abducted her.
The Search for Asha
The first police officers arrived on the scene within 10-15 minutes and tracker dogs were deployed. Unfortunately, they could not pick up Asha's scent, probably because of the strong wind at the time.
Iquilla ran through the neighborhood calling Asha's name, and friends, family, and neighbors helped the police in searching the area. But they found nothing.
Asha's black book bag and black Tweety Bird purse were missing from her room along with a pair of blue jeans with a red stripe, black sneakers, a long-sleeved white shirt with purple lettering, a red vest with black trim, black overalls with Tweety Bird on them, and a long-sleeved black and white shirt.
Discovery of evidence
Three days after Asha disappeared, on February 17, 2000, some of her belongings were discovered on the ground in the doorway of a tool shed at Turner's Upholstery on Highway 18, not far from where she had been seen by the truckers. The items included candy wrappers, a pencil, a marker pen and a hair-bow. A search of the area failed to produce additional evidence.
A week later the search was called off after 9,000 man-hours had been invested in a search of the area where she had last been seen.
The Sherrif’s office and FBI were puzzled as to why Asha had decided to leave the house. There was no evidence such as a dysfunctional family or poor academic performance. Still, investigators believed that was the most likely explanation for her departure, then she either got lost and died of hypothermia or was abducted.
A month after Asha's disappearance, the Degree family appeared on The Montel Williams Show, America's Most Wanted, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Discovery of bookbag
On August 3, 2001, Asha's bookbag and other items were discovered during a construction project off Highway 18 in Burke County, near Morganton, about 26 miles (42 km) north of Shelby.
A contractor on the site saw a black trash bag that had been buried on the property and on opening the bag there was another black trash bag within it. When he opened the second one, he found a child’s backpack with Asha’s name and telephone number written on it.
Police searched the property but were unable to find anything of interest. They did find a pair of men’s khaki pants but it was said to be irrelevant to the investigations. After Asha’s backpack was discovered, police officially announced they believed foul play was a factor in Asha’s disappearance and she had probably been adjusted after she voluntarily left the house. The family did not own a computer at the time so it was considered unlikely a sexual predator had been in touch with her.
In 2015, the sheriff’s office with the FBI and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation reviewed the case in a top-to-bottom re-examination that generated more than 350 leads.
In May 2016, this reinvestigation of the case disclosed that Asha may have been seen getting into a dark green early 1970s Lincoln Continental Mark IV, or possibly a Ford Thunderbird from the same era, along Route 18 near where she was last seen later that night. It was described as having rust around its wheel wells. Why it took 16 years to disclose this evidence was not released to the public at the time.
In October 2018, the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office detectives appealed for information from the public about two items of interest that were found in the bookbag: McElligot's Pool, a children's book by Dr. Seuss, which was borrowed from the Fallston Elementary School library in early 2000, and a New Kids on the Block concert tour T-shirt. Like the Lincoln Continental Mark IV or Ford Thunderbird information from two years earlier, it was unclear why this evidence had been kept confidential for so long.
In February 2020, the FBI released an updated age-progressed photo of what Asha would look like as a 29-year-old.
The case remains an open investigation, with a local detective reviewing leads and FBI investigators from the Charlotte Field Office consolidating and combing through case files for unexplored patterns or clues. Like Asha’s mother, investigators believe someone in the area may hold the key that could unlock the case.
Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office Detective Tim Adams, who came out of retirement in 2014 to lead the department’s probe said, “We strongly believe that there is someone out there that may have a piece of information that will help her.”
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Sources
https://charleyproject.org/case/asha-jaquilla-degree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Asha_Degree
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/20th-anniversary-of-asha-degree-disappearance-021420
https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/authorities-release-photos-of-items-that-could-help-track-down-girl-missing-for-nearly-two-decades/849304456/
