Strange Readings | The Disappearance of Asha Degree

Family

• Her parents were Harold and Iquilla Degree. Asha had a brother, older by 11 months, named O'Bryant. The Degree family lived in a rural part of North Carolina in a 2-bedroom rented duplex.
• O'Bryant and Asha were close siblings. They shared the same bedroom. O'Bryant liked to walk Asha to class, sometimes holding hands. O'Bryant helped Asha learn how to read.
• Harold and Asha had a close bond. When he was laid off for two months while Asha was a baby, he would give her late night feedings. They were both quiet people, but loved to play around with one another.
• Harold was a dock loader at PPG Industries Inc. while Iquilla worked at Kawai America, building pianos.
• According to Asha's parents, Asha was never the type of child to wander off. While she was a fairly independent child, she was not allowed to ride her bike alone to the convenience store nearby. The Degree family also did not have a computer as Asha's mother had concerns of the children accessing predatory adults.

February 11, 2000

The Cleveland County schools were all closed for the day. O'Bryant and Asha spent time with their aunt, Kisha Degree who lived down the street. Asha had basketball practice in the afternoon and then went home afterward. According to Asha's coach, she was behaving normally.

Friday

February 12, 2000

Saturday

• Asha and O'Bryant both had basketball games at Burns Middle School. The girls' game played first and Asha's team lost. Asha took it hard, crying, because she had fouled out of the game.
• Asha's mother said Asha felt bad and claimed that her leg started to hurt. Asha's mother told her that her leg was fine and she could go take a walk. Asha perked up after that.
• According to her coach, Chad Wilson, "All the girls were crying, not just Asha, and they had a good cry afterward because it was the first loss. Just a few minutes later, she was up smiling and joking and having a good time...She didn't show any behavior or say anything that led me to believe she was unhappy. We joked like we normally do, and she was very happy when sitting with her mother."
• Later that night, Asha had a sleepover at her cousin's. They stayed up late to watch Soul Train and Showtime at the Apollo.

February 13, 2000

• Asha's parents and brother picked her up from her cousin's house in the morning to go to church. They went to an aunt's home for lunch, then went home. Asha's grandmother gave Asha some Valentine's Day candy and said she seemed happy.
• Asha started sleeping around 6:30 PM and woke up from the thunderstorm two hours later. Asha went to the living room to watch television with the rest of the family for the rest of the evening.
• At 9PM, there was a motorcycle accident that caused a power outage in Asha's neighborhood. Asha's mother had been preparing a bath for the kids but decided to skip for that night. She sent them both to bed.

Sunday

• Asha's mother started searching the house, looking for Asha. She realized that Asha's book bag and house key were also missing.
• Asha's mother called Asha's grandmother across the street to check if Asha was there. When the grandmother told her she wasn't there, Harold called the police while Iquilla went up and down the street, calling out Asha's name.

The Parents' Response

• At around 4:15 AM, Roy Blanton Sr. and his son, Roy Jr. were trucking on Highway 18 when they too spotted Asha. Roy Sr. used his radio to notify other truck drivers to be on alert as they worried she might get hit.
• “It was a small figure wearing light-colored clothing. I thought it was a woman. I couldn’t tell it was a child. I thought that maybe it was a domestic violence thing where a woman left the house and was out walking.”--Roy Sr.
• Roy Sr. didn't think too much of it until Tuesday when his wife mentioned Asha Degree's disappearance to him. He then reported it to sheriff's deputies.
• The State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI both felt that these sightings were legitimate.

Roy Blanton, Sr.

• Iquilla and Harold were ruled out as suspects.
• The house was found to have all its doors locked. There was no sign of any forced entry.
• The morning Asha went missing, there was a full-scale search.
• By noon, they had a North Carolina helicopter with infrared heat-detection equipment look around.
• Search dogs were used in the investigation but they turned up with nothing.
• Hundreds of volunteers and professionals also went into a massive search in a five-mile radius of North Carolina 18 and 180.

The Area

• One mile away from the Degree home was the property of the Turners. The truck driver who witnessed Asha on the road said that he saw her around that area.
• The Turners ran an upholstery business and kept an old, doorless outbuilding to store their supplies. In there, investigation found a green marker, a yellow hair bow, a 1996 Atlanta Olympics pencil, cellophane candy wrappers, and a wallet-sized photo of a little girl.
• A neighbor who lived not too far from the Turners' shed owned six beagles. He said that usually the beagles would be barking if someone approached the property, but that night, he heard nothing.
• The family identified everything but the photograph of the girl as belonging to Asha. They did not know who the girl in the photograph was. No one has identified who that person in the photograph is and if it has any connection to Asha.
• On February 17, volunteers checked with the Turners about candy wrappers found on the road close by their home. Asha's friends stated that the candy was what Asha's basketball team received at the Saturday night game.

February 15

• After several days of nothing else to be found, including Asha or her whereabouts, the official search got suspended. The sheriff did urge the media to not ignore this case during a news conference.

February 20

Another Search

• Because the site was in a more wild area, with dense vegetation and high heat, the sheriff only allowed professionals to do the searching.
• Searchers turned up with only animal bones and a pair of men's khaki pants. It's unclear if these would have any connection to Asha.

• 11 hours away from Shelby, on September 2003, a man named Danny Ray Johnson was being charged for abducting and sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl. He had left her in the woods tied to a tree. He also confessed to assaulting an 18-year-old girl he held at knife-point.
• His brother was also pulled for questioning as he was in the area that happened and he was also convicted in the past for assault.
• Herbert provided hair and blood samples to the authorities and claimed he and his brother had alibis: Herbert was in a psychiatric facility and Danny was in jail in Virginia.
• Detectives later ruled out the men "for now."

Johnson and Herbert

• January 2014: Detectives looked into a former classmate of Asha's mother, Donald Ferguson. He had been arrested for the 1990 rape and murder of Shalonda Poole.
• Ferguson was free on February 2000 and lived about 40 miles from Shelby.
• However, they could never find anything else to link him to Asha's disappearance.

Donald Ferguson

• Coined by Gwen Ifill, social scientists use this term to describe mainstream media's focus on missing or endangered middle-class white women and lack of interest of cases involving missing people of color.
• Zach Sommers (Sociologist at Northwestern University) studied this and published his findings.
• There is already a higher amount of coverage of white people as victims of violence in news coverage.
• White women were more likely to be "the subject of news coverage relative to their proportions among missing persons, and women in general, were significantly more likely than men to be covered. Though white women make up about a third of the national population, 'half of the articles in the data set are just about white females alone...'"
• He also saw that news coverage would repeat reports on the same missing white women, boosting their cases more to mainstream eyes compared to other cases.

Missing White Woman Syndrome

• The Cleveland County Sheriff's Office made an announcement about two potential clues. The authorities did not reveal any context as to how these two items could be related to Asha's case.
• Clue 1: Dr. Seuss book, McElligot’s Pool, which was checked out of the Asha's school's library sometime in early 2000. It's not known Asha checked it out because records do not go far enough for that.
• Clue 2: New Kids on the Block T-shirt.
• There were also other discoveries made that were not be announced to the public.

October 2018

Age Progression Photo