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Inside a small gymnasium, a sad collection of mothers, aunts and uncles sat praying in a row of folding chairs, united by a common misery:
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Their babies went missing.
For Lisa Sykes, the heartache persists over her daughter Jewel, who disappeared at 37 off the small-town streets of Weldon, last seen on East Sixth Street in 2023 with no warning to anyone — even her two children.
“I feel the void inside of me,” Sykes said, standing by her daughter’s portrait. “We are not going to let that name go dead. We are going to keep that name alive.”
For Brenda Brown, the pain burns for her nephew Shawn Alston, who vanished at 39 from tiny Garysburg after an unremarkable night in 2012: walking home after watching movies at a friend’s house.
“It’s a small town,” Brown said. “How can people just disappear?”
This Thursday-night vigil marked the latest showing of bewilderment and outrage over seven people, all of them Black, still missing and presumed dead from a rural county the size of Rolesville.
Most people only experience Northampton County or its neighbor Halifax as a quick stop off Interstate 95 near the Virginia border, where a Sheetz or a Cracker Barrel can feel like the only civilization for 20 miles in any direction.
These counties hold vast acres of swampy and heavily wooded land, full of places where no car passes by for an hour, yet never far from an on-ramp to I-95 — an ideal scenario for committing crimes unseen and dashing away at 80 mph.
With that in mind, these grieving families call for more attention to a string of disappearances that seem unusually high for such a rural corner of North Carolina. To their thinking, the county seat of Jackson would be crawling with FBI agents if these victims weren’t Black people from one-stoplight towns.
“Not enough eyes on these cases,” said Brown, Alston’s aunt. “Not enough is being done.”
“People lose dogs,” said Clinton Alston, an uncle, “and they’ll put up fliers.”
These cases date back decades.
In 1963, 5-year-old Phyllis Powell went missing from Woodland, home to only 500 people then and now, while walking between her grandfather’s house and the nearby home of her mother’s cousin.
Police turned up only a footprint a mile away that fit the girl’s shoe size. Her mother theorized that somebody hit her daughter with a car and then dumped the body. Hundreds of students from Chowan College combed through woods, but the girl’s name soon vanished from newspaper headlines.
The trail is fresher on more recent cases, but just as cold.
The last time anyone saw Jalessa Reynolds, 18, she was using a computer at the public library in Halifax County, where she could connect to the Internet for schoolwork. Described as shy, unlikely to speak to strangers, she never made it home to Scotland Neck.
More recently, in 2024, Sharbrina McGee turned up missing from Seaboard along with her 3-year-old son, Khance. Friends reported a pot of spaghetti on the stove at their house in Jackson.
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“This story has always held a place in my heart,” wrote Cedez Cooke on Facebook. “I pray they are together and safe. Like honestly, was it a boyfriend ? Ex? Someone knows something.”
Most people around Rich Square knew 59-year-old Daniel Moses as the “Barbecue Man” for the chicken he grilled and delivered from home. In 2011, his house on the family land burned down with his car in the driveway, the air-conditioner running and his tools on the grill.
The difference in Moses’ case is that his sister Shelia is a well-known author, living in Atlanta at the time and now residing outside of Washington, D.C., and she has relentlessly pressed the sheriff in Northampton County and the State Bureau of Investigation for a more thorough and well-staffed search.
After her brother went missing, Moses started organizing vigils around Northampton and Halifax that pointed to the crimes as one big problem affecting rural Black people and not just a string of unfortunate crimes — all of it stemming, she has repeatedly said, from inadequate investigation.
“The people many people believe are responsible for Daniel’s disappearance are known to the Northampton County Sheriff’s Office,” she said in June. “It is my hope that this year they will ask the FBI to take over the investigation.”
One investigator involved with Moses’ case is Walter Brown, who retired from the SBI and now works part-time with the Northampton sheriff.
At the vigil in Jackson, Brown said the FBI has already assisted with the case, both as specialists and in the field. One federal agent, he said, is assigned to the disappearance.
But none of the family members has ever seen or heard from this person.
“Officially, they need to be involved,” said Brenda Brown, Alston’s aunt. “We have a lot of things unofficially.”
Solving these cases, said Brown, the retired SBI agent, will require somebody out there telling what they know. Whatever leads investigators may have followed, there isn’t yet enough evidence to charge anyone with a crime that will stick.
Sheriff Jack Smith placed the burden squarely in the community’s hands, sounding as if his department had run out of options.
“Please help us,” he said. “Help those who are missing their loved ones. I beg you.”
To provide information on any of the cases from Northampton County, call the sheriff at (252) 544-2611 or Northampton Crime Stoppers at (252) 534-1110.
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