[narrator reading]
[woman 1] I sent a dire message to her.
"Sheena, are you okay? I'm really worried about you.
I haven't heard from you. You're not returning my calls. Are you all right?"
[woman 2] I felt alarmed,
because you just never think that this kind of thing could happen to someone you know.
[narrator] Her family is desperate for answers.
Was there some kind of connection that the boyfriend had...
What does it mean when you have someone you're close to
that you're hiding from the rest of the people that you're close to?
Someone took her against her will...
or she's in trouble somewhere.
[narrator] This episode of Disappeared retraces Sheena's last known steps.
[woman 3] Chicago can be one of the most beautiful places on Earth
but it also can be very dangerous.
[woman 4] I find it weird that they said that Sheena was at a Greenleaf hostel.
I can't see my friend being here.
The mystery seems to grow as the case grows colder.
There are so many unknowns.
[woman 4] This whole time I just have so much hope because she's a fighter.
She ain't dead to me. I have no reason to think she's dead,
'cause we don't got her. Just find her.
[narrator] The more people who know Sheena's story,
the greater the chance of bringing her home.
Share on social media, get the word out.
Help find her.
[narrator reading]
[Bethany] Sheena Gibbs disappeared in Chicago, Illinois
in early November, 2021.
And she's still missing.
My name is Bethany and Sheena Gibbs is my friend.
I've known Sheena for over 20 years.
Sheena was living in Chicago, Illinois,
but she's actually from a small town in Iowa.
My name is Lilita Kelly,
and Sheena Gibbs and I have been friends since we were children.
I moved to Muscatine, Iowa, in 1991.
I was in the seventh grade and Sheena was in the sixth.
That how we met. We were both 11-years-old.
We just loved each other.
From the time we met each other, we just never missed a beat.
We did everything together. We would go down to the Mississippi,
and skip rocks in the water.
We loved the library. So we loved to read.
We used to get in trouble a little bit, too.
But overall, everything we did it was just always fun.
She loved to dance. She loved that, those African dancers.
She's just extraordinary.
Then she moved to Chicago for college.
She said that was really fun. She really liked that.
I met Sheena in the early 2000s at college in Chicago.
We were both in the psychology class together.
And she was this beautiful, tall woman who carried this energy, and...
was wearing a bright yellow shirt that said, "I am black history."
And I was wearing, um, my Malcolm X shirt
and we both kind of just gravitated toward each other after class.
She and I ended up starting a psychology club there,
and just spending a lot of time together,
and kind of forming this cluster of friends.
My name is Sarah. Sheena Gibbs is my friend.
I met Sheena in college.
There was a group of us who would study together, hang out on the beach,
play board games, go to Moody's Pub,
which is, uh, has a great burger in Chicago.
We sort of connected because Sheena had passion for African culture.
My first husband was African.
So we sort of connected over that.
[Bethany] We spent a lot of nights on the beach talking about our hopes and dreams,
the type of careers we wanted to have, love, adventures,
all kinds of things.
For Sheena, the importance for her future was about giving back
to this earth and to people.
She's always been focused on finding a way to serve people who are suffering
and marginalized communities.
And that's why she picked Anthropology and social sciences to study in school.
She's super smart, super-- Always was super smart since I met her.
She did all kind of jobs.
Sheena's definitely a motivator.
[Sarah] Sheena's mom fell seriously ill in the Fall of 2021.
Her mom needed some help and so she had already worked as a home healthcare worker.
And so, to her the natural solution was to go to Iowa to care for her mom.
She loved her family. She knew her mom didn't want to be in nursing home,
Sheena was the one that would help her mom.
Sheena had travelled back and forth from Chicago to Iowa to care for her mom.
And she was considering relocating to Iowa.
At that time the majority of our communication
was via text or phone call, or Facebook.
But gradually I started noticing,
Sheena wasn't really calling me back when I would call.
So after two or three times of this, couple of months,
I started becoming increasingly concerned
because it wasn't a normal pattern for her not to call back.
So finally in October of 2021
I sent, like a dire message to her.
[Sarah reading]
And then I would say within two or three days
she responded, and she was like, "Oh, yeah. Sorry, I've been busy."
And, "How are you doing?"
So I thought, oh, okay. She's all right.
She's fine. She's just been busy.
People get busy and things happen.
I know Sheena was busy travelling back and forth
from Iowa to Chicago, taking care of her mom.
But there was something very abnormal about the lack of communication.
And I wasn't the only one that noticed it.
[Bethany] The second week of November of 2021,
I was at home doing some work on the computer
and I saw a message from someone I didn't know
asking if I had talked with Sheena recently.
And saying that Sheena was missing.
And I was confused and thought, this is some kind of weird joke.
But I will copy this message and send it to Sheena
so that if she knows this person she can reassure them.
And so that's what I did.
I didn't really think too much of it because...
you just never think that this kind of thing could happen to someone you know.
I didn't hear back from Sheena.
And then I got a call from her aunt...
and she told me she had been missing.
I felt alarmed.
But also some disbelief.
I didn't really think it could be that she's really missing.
And it just seemed like some sort of miscommunication or misunderstanding.
So I called her, text her and message her.
And eventually it became real that she really was missing.
And this was serious and scary.
[Sarah] I was having dinner with my family when I got the call from a friend
that Sheena was missing.
At first I just kept thinking there had to be some kind of mistake.
But then I started thinking about how
she had sort of been distancing herself a little bit
and not returning phone calls as much.
But Sheena's not someone who would just go missing.
Sheena's aunt told us that she had taken the bus back to Chicago from Iowa,
November 1st.
Sheena was supposed to take the bus back to Iowa a couple days later on November 8th.
But Sheena never came back to Iowa.
We weren't sure if she had even made it back to Chicago or not.
I believe Sheena's aunt notified the Chicago Police Department, November 8th.
Shortly after, they could not get ahold of her...
and filed a missing person's report.
Police department in Iowa was also notified
because we weren't sure, had she made it back to Iowa or not.
Both police stations were notified.
My name is Linda Cook and I am a reporter for WHBF in Rock Island, Illinois.
I've been covering Missing Persons cases for quite some time.
One of the missing case I focused on is Sheena's Missing Person case.
It's believed that Sheena went missing in early November of 2021.
The case was difficult for me to follow,
and I think it's been difficult for everyone, including officials to follow
because Sheena's movements from November of that year really aren't very clear.
In late October, 2021, we know she was with her family in Iowa.
Her family thinks Sheena made it back to Chicago November 1st.
But even that can't be ascertained for sure.
No one really knows what her movements were.
You have two different states, you have two different counties.
It would be a massive, massive initiative to put all of that together
for one huge hunt.
At this point her friends and family are considering
that Sheena could be literally anywhere.
[Lilita Kelly] How do you go missing...
if you've been in Chicago all these years
right when you finna come home,
right when you finna come back to where you're from.
So I just find that very strange.
And I feel so bad, 'cause I'm like, why didn't I talk to her in two weeks?
Like, we talk so much. It's like the couple of weeks that I didn't talk to you,
and now you missin'?
What the heck? That just hurts my heart to the bone.
[Bethany] I think I was in shock.
I was in disbelief. I still find myself in disbelief sometimes.
And my mind went to, what do I need to do? What do we need to do...
to find her. She lives in Chicago, it shouldn't be that difficult.
But because Sheena had grown more distant in 2020, 2021, we did not have any leads.
I had heard that Sheena had a boyfriend in 2021, that she was staying with.
I hadn't met him, but that was what I had heard from mutual friends.
I think maybe she knew we might not approve of her boyfriend.
[Bethany] I think Sheena was dating someone before she went missing.
I don't know if that relationship was ongoing at the time she went missing,
'cause it sounds like it was on and off.
But I didn't know the name of this person,
or how to contact them, any contact information.
She kept that part of her life very private over the last, I'd say, five years.
[Linda Cook] What does it mean when you have someone you're close to...
that you're hiding from the rest of the people that you're close to?
Was there some kind of connection
that the boyfriend had that Sheena was trying to hide?
[Bethany] About two weeks after Sheena went missing
I am thinking, time is ticking,
and Sheena is likely suffering or in danger.
And we need to find out if there's any other relevant information
about her boyfriend.
[Sarah] Years before she went missing
Sheena was diagnosed with cancer at 25.
It was a really difficult time for her but she was determined to fight it,
to push through.
She was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
She went through a very long and difficult battle
with chemo and radiation.
And she was pretty much on her own in Chicago through all of this.
[Sarah] Sheena was able to get a hysterectomy,
and after a couple of years Sheena finally went into remission.
[Lilita] When we were 26 she had to get that hysterectomy.
So she knew like, right then, "Hey, I'm not never gonna be able to have kids."
That was the only thing that probably set her down for a second.
[Bethany] I think going through that battle with cancer
did take a toll on her emotionally.
And then beyond that it may have left her a little depressed
or emotionally taxed.
And it was a slow process to regain her strength after that experience.
Something did change after her battle with cancer.
And I think she felt a part of her was maybe damaged beyond repair.
[Sarah] Over time, after her cancer diagnosis,
I noticed that the caliber of men that she was dating
seemed to be a little bit more questionable.
Her previous boyfriends that I knew had been really, really awesome guys.
But after the diagnosis,
I wasn't sure why she was making the choices she was making.
I have a feeling she didn't have great self-esteem at that time.
Before Sheena disappeared after her cancer diagnosis,
one day when I was at her house she was talking to me
about a boyfriend she was dating at that time,
and she had told me that they had gotten into an altercation.
I think a mug had been thrown.
It raised a red flag. And I said, "Sheena, that's concerning.
I'm worried about your welfare."
And I started becoming increasingly concerned.
Because it became a normal pattern for her not to confide in me
about the guys she was dating.
[Bethany] The last time I saw Sheena was in June of 2021.
She was living with her new boyfriend at the time.
And there had been an altercation or disruption.
She came to my house, and she was pretty upset,
and needed a few hours to talk and calm her nerves.
A couple of weeks after she came to my house,
I sent her a text just asking if everything was okay,
and the situation had gotten any better.
And she sent a message back that she was fine,
and she was grateful that I could be there for her.
I believe that relationship was tapering down, but I don't know.
[Sarah] We realized that we knew she had this boyfriend,
but we didn't know anything about him.
No name, phone number, address...
We needed him to help us,
trying to figure out what's going on, trying to find out where Sheena is.
[Linda] Most of the time when there's a disappearance,
police look at those closest to the victim first.
And often suspects or persons of interest are family members,
whether they are spouses, boyfriends, sons, daughters.
It's possible Sheena was living with her boyfriend in the Summer of 2021.
And that possibly the relationship had become toxic.
But we don't know this for sure.
[Sarah] Domestic violence is also a possibility.
Statistically, out of domestic violence murders,
70 percent are women who are murdered.
And out of all female murders, 45 percent are murdered by someone they know,
a intimate partner.
So we passed along that she may have been dating someone to the police.
And that it seems like she may have been scared.
Her latest boyfriend was the one that she,
she obviously really liked him.
It seemed like she really liked him.
I figured maybe he was controlling, he was always bothered, like...
You know, how we talkin' on the phone,
her conversations kinda shortened up.
But she didn't never say anything wrong about that boy.
Only thing weird to me about him from my own personal view,
is I just couldn't understand why he didn't reach out.
That was my whole thing.
I said to myself, it just seemed like it was too obvious to me.
And... but not saying that it's not.
Person of interest is one thing, suspect is another.
And there has been nothing.
There's still not enough evidence to lead police to a person of interest.
At this point, we don't have any new leads
or if the police do, they're not sharing with us.
We don't know if the police were following up on the tips I was giving them.
I'm feeling angry with the police, with everyone, just the situation
and frustrated and restless
wanting to figure out what to do, how to solve this
and get Sheena back home.
[Linda] It seems like every element of this case that's known
creates a thousand more that are not
and the mystery seems to grow as the case grows colder.
Sometimes in cases of disappearance domestic violence is a factor.
Now that's not necessarily meaning
that there was violence that resulted in a death.
Sometimes people leave on their own to get away from the situation.
We have to leave that open, too.
Is it possible Sheena is missing by her own choice?
Sheena is not the type of person to run from problems
or challenges, or anything, to be honest.
I don't see her running away.
Her community was here, her family was nearby.
And she loved both of those things.
I definitely ruled out the possibility that Sheena ran away.
Didn't happen. Sheena will never give up. She's a fighter.
[Sarah] Someone asked me if I think maybe Sheena was scared,
she's in hiding, or she ran away.
But I actually believe, knowing Sheena,
that she could've gotten herself into deep trouble
by facing things head-on and not running away.
'Cause that was Sheena. Sheena always took things head-on.
[Bethany] I think Sheena did not leave voluntarily.
I think someone took her against her will,
or she's in trouble somewhere.
I think Sheena would not be away from her family and friends by choice.
So at the end of November I'm feeling devastated for Sheena's family,
devastated for myself.
A lot of pain in my heart, missing my friend.
I know Sheena was living on the north side of Chicago.
But I didn't know exactly where.
My spouse and I were kind of the people
on the ground in Chicago to help with the investigation.
I also know that police don't put up flyers.
They rely on family and friends to do that.
So that's where we started.
We put up flyers in Rogers Park and surrounding communities
because we knew Sheena was living around that area at that time.
If Sheena made it back to Chicago, she would be staying here.
So we also created an email for tips, along with the police phone number,
and we put those all over.
After that we started getting a lot of emails and questions from friends,
and people who knew her in the community, store owners,
and some people who had actually seen her.
Any tips we received we forwarded to police
in hopes that they would act on them.
[Sarah] While we were looking for Sheena,
a friend found out that she had had contact
or had become friends with an Uber driver.
We realized that he would be an important person to talk to.
He might have more information about Sheena's whereabouts.
[Bethany] He had given her rides to different places.
They had also met up for lunch a few times.
And when I first called him, he had said he'd last seen her about a month ago
in early November. He had dropped her off at a hotel called Greenleaf.
And she told him she's going back to Iowa the next day.
This was right before Sheena disappeared.
We were really excited about this rideshare driver,
because we didn't know where she was.
But now we have information that's pinpointing her whereabouts that November.
Up until this point we didn't know if she had made it back to Chicago.
So we had a solid lead, we knew where she was staying.
So it was a really good find.
[Bethany] I contacted the owners of Greenleaf Hotel
and they were able to confirm that Sheena stayed there
the days before she went missing.
Sheena was staying at the Greenleaf House, November 1st to 5th, 2021.
That would also confirm that she made it back to Chicago from Iowa.
I believe Sheena was living with her boyfriend.
So I'm not sure why she was at that hotel.
I find it weird that they said that Sheena was at that Greenleaf hostel.
I can't see my friend being here.
This ain't stuff that Sheena do, you know what I'm sayin'?
Like, that looked like a little boarding house or something.
Sheena would've got a real hotel.
So it's like y'all tryin' to place her somewhere and put this story on her.
Like she was a prostitute, or like, this is the kind of life she lived.
I'm like, that ain't Sheena.
It's confirmed that Sheena checked out of the hotel on the 5th.
But we don't know where she was after that.
What happened? How could this happen?
Where is she? How can I find her?
[Sarah] We were able to get the information from the hotel manager
to get in contact with people who had stayed at the Greenleaf House
in early November when Sheena had stayed there.
We had spoke to several people and only one remembered Sheena.
The man that remembered Sheena was Nigerian.
And Sheena had a passion for African culture,
so there could've been a connection there
and they could've really talked
and that could be why this person remembered her.
And they also asked specifically if they had been able to get the camera footage
from the motel, which was odd.
Why would you be aware of where the cameras are,
and that there's camera footage?
It seemed a little out of the ordinary, to say the least.
Was he asking about the camera footage
because that might show what happened to Sheena?
We needed to see that footage.
[Bethany] The hotel owner mentioned that there is security cameras
in the common areas of the hotel.
I feel like seeing footage of Sheena
and her final days before she went missing
would be very crucial to this investigation.
[Lilita] This whole time I just had so much hope
because if something is wrong...
Sheena is definitely a fighter.
So if we find Sheena, we'll know what happened to her.
At this point we have no idea what happened to Sheena.
We're just hoping that this video footage will give us a clue.
But the footage could only be obtained if the police requested the footage.
So there's a possibility now
to see where Sheena was, when she was there, who she was there with,
what was happening.
Sheena didn't just disappear. Something happened to Sheena.
[narrator] Sheena Gibbs was last seen November 8th, 2021.
If you have any information, please contact the Chicago Police Department,
Area 3 SVU, at 312-744-8266.
[Bethany] On December 17th, I called the detective
and let her know that the Greenleaf Hotel had security cameras.
Unfortunately we found out that the footage would only be kept for 60 days.
[Linda] The police tried to follow-up on the surveillance footage.
But by the time they got there to follow-up, it was gone.
I think having this footage of Sheena would have revealed something
about the case. Something about what was on her mind,
or how she was feeling, or who she was with, even.
We don't know and this footage is now gone forever.
[Lilita] I stayed calling the Chicago Police Department. And I just never got nowhere.
I tried to just keep it to myself, you know. I get a little angry.
I don't wanna talk about that, 'cause it just makes me angry sometimes, you know?
I just... I get upset.
[Sarah] I have a lot of respect for the police.
They're doing a job and it's not an easy one.
I would not wanna do their job.
That being said, in my opinion,
there was gross negligence in this case.
This footage could've provided answers, but now we'll never know.
[Bethany] I know that the police are very busy,
and I know that they're likely understaffed,
but it really felt like Sheena wasn't important to them,
and her friends and family were doing more of the detecting
than the actual detectives.
I feel really angry that police did not take action.
I wish they had contacted the hotel sooner.
[Sarah] Everything that we learned about Sheena
we always passed on to the detective
to make sure that they had any and every possible lead that could be helpful.
But I felt like the police had given up hope.
It felt like if the police aren't looking for Sheena,
who was gonna be looking for Sheena?
[Linda] Chicago can be on of the most beautiful places on Earth,
but it also can be very dangerous.
In 2021, 3,000 black and brown women went missing in Chicago,
that we know of. If the police did only that,
maybe they could make a dent in those numbers.
But they have so many other things to do that have to be done right away.
Black women and girls make up more than a third
of the nation's missing person cases.
[reporter] Mayor Lori Lightfoot saw the numbers,
listened to the victims, and determined that fighting the shadow pandemic
would require the full force of city government,
not simply the cops and courts.
[Linda] Think about the state of policing right now.
Police officers are few and far between.
So there are fewer officers addressing what we call "breaking news,"
whether it's a robbery, a burglary, a shooting.
And those things that need to be addressed now
make everything else take a back-burner.
[Sarah] I understand the police are overworked.
I understand a lot of black and brown people go missing. I get it.
But, dude. Do your job. Like, seriously. Just do your job.
I have, let's say, some unresolved anger at this point.
It's a problem. It's a problem.
[Bethany] I felt really angry and frustrated
that I could not get police to follow-up on these tips.
That's when we realized we need to take things further.
And maybe the police don't have the resources, or is not at invested
in following-up on this case as we once thought.
So we tried to just take action to get people with higher status,
and higher publicity onboard for Sheena's case.
And we found the alderwoman of the Rogers Park area.
My name's Maria Hadden. I'm alderperson here in Chicago's 49th Ward.
This is where Sheena Gibbs lived before she went missing November 8th, 2021.
When Sheena went missing, her friends were very much involved
in trying to elevate the case.
A lot of times our detectives are overwhelmed with caseloads,
and it can be difficult for them to prioritize,
and they're being pulled in a lot of different directions.
And so sometimes also having an alderperson or other community reach out,
offering to help, bring in more attention,
or being a person that can help coordinate even that contact,
can make a really big difference.
[Sarah] Alderwoman Maria Hadden has been very helpful.
in stepping forward and trying to get things rolling.
When the alderwoman responded,
she was able to put some pressure and get things going in Sheena's case
a little bit more.
Eventually they did change the detective. So that was good.
[Lilita] That's when we started getting
a couple of responses for Chicago Police Department.
That's when they act like, "okay, we're gonna act to be involved."
They did have, like, four different detectives on this case
that did nothing at all.
Maybe 'cause I watch all these channels all the time.
I said, well, you watch these things,
and it be that one cop that comes
that be really serious. There's this one detective just like,
"I won't stop until I find her."
[Sarah] About seven months after she had disappeared,
to bring attention and bring awareness to Sheena's plight
Alderwoman Maria Hadden and artist Damon Lamar Reed
were able to put together an event where he created a beautiful mural of Sheena
and were able to bring awareness to the fact that she was missing.
[Bethany] Damon Lamar Reed is part of the Still Searching Project.
And he painted the mural on the side of The Glenwood Bar in Rogers Park.
Sheena loved Rogers Park.
And the Glenwood Bar, we were so grateful they opened their business up
for this opportunity and to aid the cause in finding Sheena.
Sheena Gibbs was last seen here in Rogers Park late last year.
Her family hopes this mural will bring renewed attention to her case.
[Sarah] This mural of Sheena was unveiled on May 22nd, 2022.
Friends and family attended, the community attended.
And it was really a beautiful event,
[Bethany] He ended up painting a beautiful mural of Sheena
and there was a lot of media attention surrounding that
so that took the efforts and the action a step further.
[Maria Hadden] The day of the mural commemoration,
dozens more people learned Sheena's story.
And that mural is there so that people still know she's missing.
And it contains information how you can get in contact.
[Bethany] So we had different tips coming because of the mural.
It was really, really amazing to see that people still cared,
that people wanted to find Sheena.
So in June of 2022,
the police started asking if Sheena had any friends
or associates in the Winthrop Harbor area in Illinois,
because that was the last known ping on her cellphone
on November 8th, 2021, which is the day she disappeared.
My understanding is that it took seven months
for them to trace her phone.
Something that I feel should've been done a lot sooner,
but something that was probably being done at this point
because of alderwoman Maria Hadden...
and pressure that was being put politically on the police department.
So when I got the call about Winthrop Harbor,
I looked it up on Google Maps.
I'd never heard of it, never been there.
Didn't know of any connection to Sheena to that area.
But I saw that it was quite a drive away,
about a couple of hours away from Chicago.
So I really was surprised that her phone had surfaced so far away.
[Linda] Police discovered that Sheena's phone had pinged in Winthrop Harbor.
Like, just because it pinged there doesn't mean that's where she was.
I just felt like, well, maybe we're finally getting somewhere.
Maybe with this Winthrop Harbor thing, and her cellphone,
maybe then we're gonna find something.
Maybe something new is gonna pop up.
So I was sort of in a way almost optimistic because it was a lead.
[Lilita] And I'm like, "ah, Sheena, where are you?"
She ain't dead to me. I have no reason to think she's dead,
'cause we don't got her. Just find her.
[Bethany] In late August
they announced that there would be a search in that area
in September 2022.
Learning about the ground search was actually comforting,
and the fact that it showed me the police were still interested,
and were still working on this case and finding Sheena.
Finally we were finding a way to move forward.
The police were requesting volunteers.
They were gonna do a search of the area in Winthrop Harbor
where Sheena's phone had last pinged and the surrounding areas.
The Winthrop Harbor search occurred on September 6th, 2022.
A group of us came out to search for Sheena,
or anything that could've belonged to Sheena.
They told us, if you find anything in the woods that could belong to a woman,
or belong to Sheena, pull it out so they can let the dogs sniff it.
So they went through several wooded areas with dogs,
and we went through wooded areas and pulled out anything we could find.
And the whole search culminated at an electronics recycling plant,
which is where they thought the phone might've been tossed.
The whole search took about six hours.
It's my understanding that they never found the phone,
because the phones there are destroyed fairly quickly,
after three days or something.
[Bethany] I don't believe they discovered anything on that search.
If the police did find something,
they haven't released any information about it.
After the search I spoke with the detective
and I asked her, "Can you tell us when is the last time that Sheena was with her phone,
that we know she texts on it, or she called on it."
"Was she with her phone in Winthrop Harbor?"
And the detectives said, "We don't know."
The last known time we have Sheena utilizing the phone
was November 8th, 2021, in Chicago.
[Maria] So it's unclear whether Sheena had ever been there herself.
Whether it was just her cellphone that was there.
Especially with so much time having passed between her disappearance
and the ping of this phone.
I think there were some hopes, but some slim hopes of maybe this being a good lead,
and after the search it seemed like that lead also was a dead-end.
So we have no way of knowing if the phone was in Sheena's hand when it pinged,
or if it had been tossed there.
In my opinion,
oftentimes the most likely scenario is the most obvious scenario.
I think that if she was in a toxic relationship,
that needs to be looked at.
[Maria] I know that recently some folks think that
Sheena's disappearance might be related to some gang involvement
that allegedly her boyfriend is involved in.
Maybe he's just one of those hood, you know. One of them hood people
that's just... I don't mess with them, you know?
'Cause I'm thinking, that's the type of person he is.
'Cause I know people like that.
I've grown up in the hood.
[Maria] What we think of as gangs are really small block by block cliques almost.
And more commonly, especially in a neighborhood like Rogers Park
a lot of it's really low level...
In my personal opinion, I think it's unlikely
gang involvement has a role specifically in her disappearance.
[Linda] Gangs are everywhere. They're certainly in Chicago.
Now, do we know that there's a gang related element to this case,
absolutely not. But we can't rule that out.
[Bethany] So it's been over a year since Sheena's been missing...
We don't have any new leads,
or if the police do, they're not sharing with us.
But we won't give up and we remain hopeful that we'll find Sheena.
The problem with cases like this, particularly as far as a reporter goes,
we want to deal with just the facts,
is that there are so many unknowns.
She could've disappeared on her own.
She could've been a victim of foul play.
She could've decided to leave and go somewhere
with someone who we don't even know about.
This is such a mystery because not only are we
dealing with so few real, confirmed facts,
but also we're dealing with a huge metropolitan area where anyone could get lost
and disappear.
I think that I want the world to know
that Sheena is a great person, independent,
just don't give up on her, please.
She's counting on us. I know Sheena's waiting on us to find her.
She's waiting on us to find her. Just bring her home.
There's a very intense, prolonged form of grief
that happens when someone you love is missing.
And it's like a stabbing pain that just doesn't go away.
And torments you in your sleep, in your dreams,
in your waking hours, and is just inconsolable,
and so frustrating.
I would like to say if anybody knows anything about where Sheena was
prior to her disappearance, or after,
please, please reach out.
It could make all the difference,
even if if seems little, please reach out and let us know.
Think of if your sister or your mother or your friend went missing.
We know that there's a lot of information out there
about Sheena still to be discovered,
and if anyone has any kind of knowledge about Sheena,
even if they think it's insignificant,
please contact Chicago SVU...
[Sarah] If I could see Sheena again,
I don't think I could even talk, I would hug her first.
And I would probably just break down crying.
And then I would just tell her I love her.
If I could see Sheena I would hug her so hard...
um, and tell her I love her...
and to never go away again.
One day, Alex told me that he was leaving for Kauai.
We thought, "What if he did get involved into a cult?"
We're gonna go to Hawaii now and look for our friend.
That island is scary and dangerous.
This is not some fun adventure, this is life and death.