Crimes NEWS

Shaniya Davis, 5, ’sold for sex by her mother’ discovered dead at the side of U.S. road

Published by onlines on November 18, 2009

A missing five-year-old girl allegedly sold into prostitution by her mother has been found dead.

Shaniya Davis had been missing since November 10 after she was last seen being carried into a hotel room by a man.

FBI agents and U.S. Marshalls joined the nationwide search for the youngster amid fears she had been sold to a paedophile ring.

Police have charged the girl’s mother, Antoinette Davis, with human trafficking and prostitution offences.

Antoniette Davis

Bardley Lokhart

An arrest warrant issued for the 25-year-old said she allowed her daughter to be taken ‘with the intent that she be held in sexual servitude’.

Davis, who is pregnant, first reported her daughter missing last Tuesday.

Police were suspicious of her story after reviewing a timeline of the events leading up to her disappearance from a trailer park in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

They later found CCTV footage from a hotel 40 miles from Fayetteville showing the five-year-old girl being carried into a hotel room by Mario McNeill.

She had not been seen since and her mother has refused to co-operate with police.

The girl had only been living with Davis for three weeks, according to her father Bradley Lockhart.

He had primary custody of the girl, but had agreed to let her stay with her mother after she found a place to live and held a job for six months.

Lockhart broke down in tears at a press conference last night when he sobbed: ‘Everybody makes it a point not to ignore, to look past a situation where a person, a child, or anybody might be in danger … so that we don’t have another tragedy like Shaniya.’

He said authorities have given him limited information, but he was to meet with them later.

‘It’s not the result I wanted, it’s not the result any father or family would want for their children,’ he said.

‘But God has a greater calling for all of us.’

Police have not charged anyone with molesting Shaniya, but said the investigation is ongoing.

The man accused of taking her, Mario Andrette McNeill, turned himself in on Friday.

Police said he admitted to kidnapping the child and has been charged.

CCTV footage shows Shaniya in the company of McNeill near a hotel on the day she was kidnapped.

According to arrest documents, Davis ‘knowingly provided Shaniya Davis with the intent that she be held in sexual servitude’ and she ‘permitted an act of prostitution’.

Shaniya’s half-sister, Cheyenne Lockhart, spoke on the U.S. talkshow Nancy Grace on Monday.

She said that she found it difficult to believe Antoinette Davis had treated her daughter so poorly.

‘She seemed like the sweetest woman. She didn’t come from much, but … she had the sweetest voice, she had the sweetest personality, and especially toward me,’ said Ms Lockhart, who shared a father with Shaniya.

‘I would never think that she would do anything like that.’

Their father said Shaniya went to her mother’s home on October 9.

Mario McNeill+little girl