In January 2002 my mother walked out of a hotel on Collins Avenue and never came back. For twenty-four years her case sat where cases like hers usually sit. Open, but cold. A missing person.
That has changed. The Miami Beach Police Department have told me that my mother’s case has moved out of missing persons and into homicide, and that it is being actively investigated by a new team of detectives.
I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean. It is not an answer. Nobody has been charged, and nothing about what happened to her has been established. What it means is that the people whose job it is to look at her case are now looking at it as what our family has believed for a very long time, and what police themselves put in writing to my grandmother back in 2008: that Alysha is not coming home, and that somebody did something to her.
In August I flew to Miami for the first time since I was a child. I walked the street she was last seen on. I sat with detectives for four hours, including the sergeant who oversees homicide, and went through everything my family has gathered over two decades, along with the files the private investigator my grandmother hired put together in 2002, only months after she disappeared.
I went to that meeting frustrated. There are things I wish had happened twenty-four years ago, when the trail was fresh, and those chances are gone. I came out of it feeling something different. That team took it seriously. They want to solve it. I believe they can.
I also want to say plainly why I think this happened now. It happened because people would not let her be forgotten. Because my grandmother kept every file, every note, every scrap of paper for twenty-four years. Because reporters in Miami and in New Zealand took a woman most people had never heard of and put her name back in front of the public. Because strangers shared her face. This is not my win. It belongs to everyone who refused to let her disappear twice.
The ask has not changed, and if anything it matters more now. If you were around South Beach in late 2001 or early 2002, if you worked at the Shore Club, if you parked cars there, if you worked the door or the floor at the clubs, if you knew her as Alysha, as Krsangi, or as Yami, I want to hear from you. You do not need to know what happened. You do not need to be certain. If it feels too small to mention, it is probably the thing I am missing.
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