Unsolved: Relisha Rudd

this case starts on Friday, February 28th of 2014.

That day, eight-year-old Relisha Redd was absent from school.

There was no excuse that was given, but this wasn't necessarily abnormal for Relisha because she had been missing a lot of school lately.

The next day, though, March 1st, her aunt Ashley reported that she spent a lot of time with Relisha at her own apartment.

So even though she was missing school, she was still seeing family.

Relisha and her brothers would spend a lot of weekends over at their Aunt Ashley's because they wanted to get out of the shelter that they were living in.

That morning, Ashley did Relisha's hair.

She added pink and white bows to the top of her braids.

Relisha was all smiles when her family got their phone out to record a quick video for her mother, Shamika.

In that footage, Relisha grins at herself in front of the camera and repeats after her aunt, we chillin' at Aunt Ashley's house.

Hi, Instagram.

Shortly after that video was taken, Relisha put on her winter coat and pink snow boots, and she said goodbye to her aunt Ashley, and then she left.

And Ashley had no idea that she would never

see Relisha again.

But before we get into how the second grader disappeared, we need to start at the beginning.

So in 2014, Relisha Redd was eight years old.

She was the eldest of four siblings, raised by her 28-year-old mother, Shamika Young, and Shamika's then-fiancé, 28-year-old Antonio Wheeler.

Relisha and her oldest brother were full siblings, sharing a mostly absent father at the time named Irving Rudd.

The younger two boys were Relisha's half-brothers, Antonio's biological children, though he played the role of dad in the lives of all four children.

But things were incredibly tough for this family.

At the time of Relisha's disappearance, they were all sharing a room in a crowded shelter for the unhoused in Washington, D.C.

But their problems, or rather Shamika's problems, started long before Relisha was born.

Shamika's family on all sides carried, I mean, from the research we've done, it seemed to be like a massive amount of generational trauma.

Her mother, Melissa Young, basically raised herself coming of age on the streets of Washington, D.C. in the early 1980s.

This was right in the middle of the era that's now known as the crack epidemic.