It was a very emotional time last night when I message Shauntel Sallis (Phylicia Barnes’ older maternal sister) to determine if she had heard the verdict. She expressed sadness despite the conviction though, as I’m sure many who supported Phylicioa Barnes and her family did, when the relizatkiion that the man who was charged and ultimately acquitted for her murder, was convicted for the crime of rape in a new criminal case involving yet another teenage girl. They say justice is blind, but in Baltimore City it often feels like justice wears a different face depending on the courtroom, the jurisdiction, the evidence culture, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and whose child is lying dead in the water.

Now that Michael Maurice Johnson has been convicted of first-degree rape and first-degree assault in Baltimore County, the eyebrows are being raised across Maryland, and not simply about this new conviction. They’re about the painful shadow that still hangs over the name Phylicia Simone Barnes. The records will now show that Johnson, who had been cleared after three trials in Phylicia’s 2010 killing, is now also convicted in this new rape and assault case on April 24, 2026.

For those of us who followed, wrote about, and fought to keep Phylicia’s name alive when her story drifted in and out of the headlines, this latest conviction lands like a huge boulder on our hearts. It does not legally convict Johnson of anything related to Phylicia’s death. Unfortinately double jeopardy laws doen’t allow us to rewrite a verdict because of what happened years later. Morally, emotionally, and publicly though, this conviction forces Baltimore City to look backward and ask a painful question. “What did the justice system miss?”

Phylicia Barnes was a 16-year-old honors student from North Carolina who came to Baltimore to visit family and never made it home alive. Her body was later found in the Susquehanna River. Johnson (the last to see the teen alive) was arrested, tried, convicted once, granted a new trial, tried again, and eventually and suspiciously acquitted in 2018 after being tried a third time during a bench trial. The case became a painful example of how a family can endure a prosecution, a conviction, a reversal, a mistrial and an acquittal, only to be left with the same haunting delimma they had from the beginning, and the same unanswered question of “who killed Phylicia?”

Now comes the uncomfortable political and legal twist. Ivan J. Bates, Baltimore City’s current State’s Attorney, was one of Michael Johnson’s defense attorneys during the Phylicia Barnes litigation. CBS Baltimore quoted Bates in 2013 criticizing prosecutors after Johnson’s conviction was thrown out, saying the state had “got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.”

To be fair, Bates was doing what defense lawyers are constitutionally required to do, which is to fight for his client. A defense attorney’s job is not to make the public comfortable. A defense attorney’s job is to challenge the state, test the evidence, expose weakness, and make sure the government proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the entire American legal system in a nutshell, but the public is also allowed to feel the sting of such irony.

The man who once helped defend Michael Johnson in one of Baltimore’s most painful child murder cases now sits as the city’s top prosecutor. That doesn’t mean Bates did anything wrong. It doesn’t mean he violated ethics. It doesn’t mean he is responsible for Johnson’s later conduct. But it does show how tightly connected Baltimore City’s legal culture can be. How today’s defense lawyer can become tomorrow’s prosecutor, how courtroom victories can later feel hollow, and how families of victims are often left to carry the emotional burden long after the lawyers have moved on to higher office, bigger titles, and polished political careers.

This is where Baltimore’s justice system must be examined beyond legal technicalities, because justice is not only about whether a conviction can survive appeal. Justice is also about whether the system is competent enough to protect the vulnerable, disciplined enough to build clean cases, honest enough to admit its failures, and humble enough to understand that a botched prosecution can become a second wound to anhother grieving family.

In the Barnes case, Johnson’s first conviction was undone after the court found serious problems tied to the prosecution’s handling of evidence and witnesses. Reports at the time described disputes over key witness credibility, allegations surrounding a detective, and defense attacks on the state’s case. That matters in criminal cases, and certainly mattered on the case of Phylicia Barnes murder, because when prosecutors mishandle cases, when detectives become distractions, when witnesses are vulnerable to impeachment, and when the courtroom becomes less about the victim and more about institutional mistakes, the person who suffers most is not the lawyer. It’s not the judge. It’s not the politician. It’s the dead child.

It’s the mother, the father, the family and friends who still wants answers, and left with the burden to still wonder why and how a daughter came to Baltimore and ended up in a river.It’s every Black girl whose disappearance is treated as less urgent, less marketable, less worthy of national outrage, and it’s every citizen who has to watch the same legal system fail, shrug, rebrand itself, and ask the public to just trust the process again.

Michael Johnson’s rape conviction in Baltimore County does not close the Phylicia Barnes case. It reopens the public wound. It reminds us that technical justice and moral justice are not always the same thing. A courtroom can say “not guilty” while a community still feels robbed of truth. A defense attorney can be praised for skill while a victim’s family still feels crushed by the result. A prosecutor can rise to power while old cases continue to whisper from the grave.

Baltimore must be honest enough to hold all of those truths at once. Ivan Bates may have been a strong defense attorney. He may now be a forceful prosecutor and both things can be true, but the larger issue is not merely Ivan Bates. The larger issue is a legal culture where the public often feels that justice depends less on truth and more on which side of the gavel has the sharper lawyer, cleaner file, better strategy, and fewer mistakes.

That is a dangerous perception and in communities already wounded by violence, poverty, corruption, and distrust, perception can become its own kind of evidence. The Phylicia Barnes case should have been handled with the precision owed to a child whose life had been stolen. Instead, it became a maze of legal reversals, courtroom drama, witness problems, and unresolved grief. Now Johnson’s conviction in a separate violent sexual assault case forces Baltimore City to ask whether the system failed only in court, but whether it failed long before that.

Phylicia was more than a case file. She was a daughter. She was an honor student. She was a child with dreams. She was the flower in the river, and today, after this new conviction, Baltimore City cannot pretend the old questions have disappeared simply because the court record says the murder case is over. The record may be closed, but the wound isn’t. Neither is the demand for justice in the Phylicia Barnes murder case.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

Ther People’s Champion Blog

They say lightning never strikes twice. But in the case of Michael Maurice Johnson, that old saying feels less like wisdom and more like a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe. For those of us who still carry the memory of “A Flower in the River” (the tragic story of Phylicia Barnes, a bright young girl whose life ended in horror, and whose case I fought to keep alive through my blog), these new criminal charges do not land like some random twist of fate. They land like a chilling reminder that when the justice system fails to stop violence the first time, it risks giving that violence room to rise again.

Now, with the man accused and subsequently acquitted of killing a honors teen over a decade ago, accused again of rape and attempted murder, the question is no longer whether lightning can strike twice. The question must be how many young women have to suffer before this system stops pretending repeated danger is just coincidence.

Michael Maurice Johnson is back in a Maryland courtroom, this time in Baltimore County, facing charges of attempted murder, rape, and assault stemming from an alleged attack on a 19-year-old woman. Prosecutors say the victim was strangled repeatedly, sexually assaulted, and left so badly injured she could not speak normally when help arrived. Johnson has denied the most serious charges, and the case is now being tried before a jury.

For those of us who fought for Phylicia Barnes, there is something especially sickening about this moment. Barnes, the 16-year-old honors student whose life was stolen in Baltimore after disappearing in December 2010, became a symbol of how fragile justice can be when a young Black girl is the victim. Johnson was once convicted in her case, then later won a new trial, and in 2018 a judge acquitted him, ruling the state had not produced enough evidence to convict him.

While the court determined that the state failed to prove it’s case against Johnson in 2018, there is an eery similarity between the barnes teen and the current victim’s cases. Barnes was believed to have been sexually assaulted and then asphyxiated, before being discarded in the Susquehana River in Maryland. The same allegations of rape and attempted murder are being lodged against Johnson in the current 19-year-old victim’s case, as she testified before a jury in Towson, Maryland 3 days ago.

When Johnson was charged the first time back in 2011, I did not sit silently while Phylicia’s name faded from the headlines. Through my blog, I pushed, wrote, and advocated for justice in her case because too many people were prepared to move on while her family was left with grief and unanswered questions. That’s why these new allegations do not feel like some isolated shock. They feel more like a brutal reminder of what happens when violent men slip through the cracks and society pretends that legal outcomes always equal real justice.

This is the mockery of it all. The public is constantly told to trust the system, yet here we are again, watching a man once at the center of one young woman’s death now accused of horrific violence against another. Whether the courts can prove every charge in this new case remains for the jury to decide, but the pattern itself is enough to make the public sick. When the justice system fails to protect the vulnerable, the next victim pays the price for that failure.

Phylicia Barnes deserved better. This new young woman deserved better. The people who work, write, and fight to keep these cases alive should not have to keep watching the same nightmare return in different forms. People say lightning does not strike twice. But sometimes it does, and sometimes what looks like lightning is really a justice system so broken, so slow, and so blind that it keeps giving danger another chance to breathe.

For the past two years, Johnson who is now 42-years-old, has been locked up in Baltimore County, accused of a brutal crime inside an apartment in Rosedale. Prosecutors alleged he strangled a teenager in an attack that lasted six hours, using his hands and a fan cord. The victim was so badly injured, charging documents stated, she could not speak and had to communicate with police by text. That victim was in foster care and told police Johnson became enraged when he thought he heard her talking about a boy during a phone call with her sister, but Johnson claimed the victim attacked him and beat him because he was texting another woman. 

We all will be watching patiently to see what the outcome of these new allegations against Michael Johnson will result in. Our hearts go out to the latest victim of such a violent sexual assault, but we can’t help but feel cheated out of justice while remebering the life of young Phylicia Barnes, the flower that ended up in a river and never got justice.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

Her Dad Raheem Mustafa once told me Phylicia Barnes kept her head in the skies. Redfelecting upon the memories of when he used to take her to the airport to watch airplanes take off, and like any child still full of wonder, she looked upward toward possibility, toward hope, toward life. Her mother Janice-Sallis-Mustafa, shattered by fear and grief, said words that still echo all these years later: “My daughter is a flower.” That’s exactly who Phylicia was. A flower. Delicate, beautiful, alive with promise. She should have been protected but instead, she was taken, discarded, and ultimately found in the river. Now, fifteen years later, the silence surrounding what happened to this child remains one of the most disturbing indictments of Baltimore, and the Community’s failure to protect her and to deliver truth.

Phylicia Barnes will not be just another headline. She was not be a statistic. She was not just another Black child America allowed to slip from the front page and into the shadows. She was a 16-year-old honor student from Monroe, North Carolina, visiting family in Baltimore during Christmas break, a bright young girl with a future in front of her. Then she vanished on December 28, 2010, and months later, on April 20, 2011, her nude body was found floating near the Conowingo Dam in the Susquehanna River. Her death was later ruled a homicide. Fifteen years have now passed, and still this case sits like an open wound.

I called her flower in the river because that is how this case has always felt to me. A beautiful child discarded, carried away by cold water, while the world moved on too quickly and too comfortably. However, I have not moved on, and I will not (a promise I made to her family). The people who were around Phylicia in those final hours have had nearly a decade and a half to continue living their lives, building routines, creating distance, and convincing themselves that silence is something other than cowardice. It’s not. Silence in a case like this is complicity of the spirit.

The known facts have never stopped being disturbing. Phylicia disappeared while staying with relatives in Baltimore. Police said she was last seen on December 28, 2010. After she vanished, there was no activity on her phone, no use of her credit cards, and no Facebook updates. Authorities publicly said they were “enormously concerned.” A large search effort followed. A reward grew, billboards went up, and volunteers searched. Then in April 2011, even after a major search of Patapsco Valley State Park, police admitted they were essentially back at square one. Just days later, her body was discovered near the Conowingo Dam, about 45 miles from where she disappeared in Northwest Baltimore.

And then came the ugly legal maze that so often deepens grief instead of relieving it. Michael Johnson, the ex-boyfriend of Phylicia’s half-sister (Deena Barnes, who Phylicia had been staying with while in Baltimore) and the man authorities said was the last person to see her alive, was charged in 2012. Prosecutors alleged that Michael Johnson asphyxiated Phylicia Barnes inside her sister’s apartment, put her body into a 35-gallon plastic tub, carried it out, and ultimately disposed of her in the river. They also presented testimony that he had made sexual advances toward her after letting her drink alcohol.

He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2013. That conviction was later thrown out, the case unraveled through repeated court battles, and by March 30, 2018, Johnson was subsequently acquitted after a third trial. Whatever anyone believes happened, the public record is clear on this much. Phylicia Barnes was killed, and the system failed to deliver a final, lasting measure of accountability and justice.

An honors kid just visiting family and suddenly taken from this earth. Her body was found naked in a river. Somebody knows more than they have said. Memory fades, loyalties shift, guilt grows heavier with age, and consciences do sometimes crack. Cases are not only solved by science. Sometimes they are solved because time finally breaks the silence that fear protected.

So let this be another reminder, another public record, another refusal to let Phylicia Simone Barnes be buried under the comfort of other people’s forgetting. If you were there, if you heard something, if you saw something, if you know what happened inside that apartment, after that apartment, on that day, or in the days that followed, speak up now. Fifteen years is too long to hide behind confusion, friendship, family ties, or old fear. A girl is dead. A family was shattered. The truth is still owed.

Phylicia Simone Barnes deserved better in life. She deserved better in death. She deserves better now than this long, sickening silence. Somebody knows what happened, and we knoow this because one of the females hanging around the apartment tweeted het location (“it’s trapped at the dam, don’t pull the level”) before she was even found. If no one around her had the courage to protect her then, the least they can do now is tell the truth. In her memory, while still seeking justice.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

The current state of affairs with the United States, it’s association and alliance with the State of israel, their current strife with other nations in the region of the the Arabian pennisula, and around the globe has the average American worried and fearful that yet, another unwanted war is on the horizon for our country. Let us be honest regarding the reality that many of our sons and daughters may be ushered into a war the country doesn’t want, and most assuredly will result in the ievitable carnage of Americans dying on the battlefield in the name of our country’s propurted fight to secure American democracy. I want to speak truthfully to the heart of such a myth, because America herself really never has.

For more than half a century, this country allowed the open, public torture and murder of Black people while the federal government stood by like a willing accomplice. From the end of Reconstruction forward, lynching was not some random outbreak of lawlessness, or the result of overly pssionate mob violence that got out of hand. It was policy by neglect. It was a custom of terrorism. It was white supremacy enforced with rope, fire, bullets, knives, crowds, cameras, postcards, and applause. In many of these incidents, was carried out on the basis of mere suspicion alone that a black person was guilty.

When the time came for the United States government to act, it refused. Congress tried again and again to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Not once. Not twice. But over 200 times, and what happened? Southern senators got up on the Senate floor and talked, and talked, and talked until the bills died. They weaponized procedure in defense of barbarism. White terror was crafted in the language of “states’ rights” and “constitutional principle,” when what they were really defending was the right of white mobs to hunt, mutilate, burn, and kill Black human beings without federal interference whatsoever, and with complete impunity.

The names of the bills changed, but the moral crime stayed the same.The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House in 1922 and was strangled in the Senate. The Costigan-Wagner Bill became the next great effort, but it too was abandoned in the face of southern obstruction and presidential cowardice. Then came the Gavagan Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the House in 1937 and was buried in the Senate during the 1938 battle when segregationists again made clear that preserving white domination mattered more to them than law, justice, or human life. Think about what that means.

These were not backwoods lynch mobs acting in secret while Washington looked the other way. These were United States senators, elected officials from sovereign American states, standing in the highest legislative chamber in the land and using the rules of democracy to protect racial murder. They did not merely fail to stop lynching. They fought to continue it and keep the federal government powerless against it. The U.S. government didn’t have a stance of nuetrality, it was complicit, and the blood of black lives are squarely on the hands of American states who supported such barbarism.

The presidents of that era did not save us either. Franklin Roosevelt, despite personally condemning lynching, refused to spend the political capital needed to force the issue because he feared losing southern support for his political agenda. Black lives were often used as bargaining chips for politics in Amerioca’s history. That is the truth America keeps trying to dress up in polite language. Many elected officials chose political convenience over Black life. They chose coalition management over justice and chose legislative strategy over the torn, burned, broken bodies of Black men, women, and children hanging from American trees like a “strange fruit”.

So when people ask why many Black Americans have always had a complicated, wounded, distrustful relationship with this country, the answer is right here before your eyes.Why should Black people rush to die for a nation that spent generations refusing to protect them from domestic racial terror? Why should Black people wave the flag without question when their government allowed them to be butchered in broad daylight and then debated for decades whether their lives were even worth federal protection? Why should we pretend patriotism is simple for Black America when this republic treated Black death as negotiable?

The United States Senate didn’t even apologize for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation until 2005. I said 2005, which was 145 years after the lynching era began. Let that sink in. Not in 1925, in 1935, nor in 1955. Not even during the height of the civil rights movement. It wasn’t until 2005 and even after all that time, a federal anti-lynching law was not actually signed into law until March 2022. That’s a delay and national disgrace that stretched across generations. There is still no accountability!

Who in government was ever punished for allowing this reign of terror to continue decade after decade? What official institution has paid reparations to the descendants of those who were tortured, mutilated, hanged, burned alive, shot to pieces, castrated, dismembered, or dragged through the dirt of this so-called democracy? Who? Where is the justice for the families? Where is the punishment for the lawmakers who defended inaction? Where is the reckoning for the presidents who refused to lead? Where is the repair for a people whose suffering was not incidental, but structural? These aren’t idle questions to simply propagate antagonistically about America’s dark past for an acceptable answer. The answer is that America in all actuality has not truly resolved her race struggles, especially where her children of color are concerned.

The names of black victims who fell prey to racial violence in modern times (although some cases were disputed to be about racism) since the 1970s is a benchmark that clearly illustrates that America’s view of black lives continue to be expendable. For Example:

Here is a representative list, not a complete one, of Black people whose deaths drew national attention because they were tied to racial violence, vigilante violence, police brutality, or police-related deaths since the 1970s. I am excluding people like Rodney King, whose case was nationally pivotal but who was not killed.

Late 1970s–1990s: Arthur McDuffie, Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Yusef Hawkins, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Oscar Grant are among the best-known names from that period and its immediate aftermath. McDuffie’s 1979 killing by Miami-area officers helped trigger the 1980 Miami uprising; Yusef Hawkins’s 1989 murder became a national symbol of racist mob violence; Diallo’s 1999 shooting became a national flashpoint over racial profiling and police brutality; Sean Bell and Oscar Grant likewise became nationally recognized symbols of police violence.

2010s: Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, and Atatiana Jefferson are among the most nationally recognized names. Trayvon Martin’s killing and George Zimmerman’s acquittal helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement, and the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 helped expand it nationally; Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile became major national rallying points in the years that followed.

2020s: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Tyre Nichols, and Sonya Massey are among the names that drew especially broad national attention. Britannica identifies Floyd’s killing, along with the earlier 2020 deaths of Arbery and Taylor, as central to the wave of nationwide and international protest that year; Tyre Nichols’s death again ignited national outrage in 2023, and Sonya Massey’s 2024 killing after she called 911 for help quickly became another nationally watched police-violence case.

Despite these alarming volume of cases, America wants credit now for finally doing in 2022 what it should have done generations earlier, but you don’t get moral applause for arriving at justice nearly a century late. You don’t get to celebrate yourself for finally outlawing what you deliberately tolerated. You certainly don’t get to call yourself righteous when the record shows that, for decade after decade, this nation protected a system of racial violence more than the victims who suffered from it.

This is why many Black Americans hear lofty speeches about freedom and democracy here and abroad, and feel nothing but insult. We know this country’s other language, like abandonment, selective justice, white tears, white innocence, white delay, white excuse, and Black graves. We know the language America, but they expect and demand patriotism from those of us who have been betrayed.

The lynching era was not an unfortunate side chapter in American history. It was America’s history, its original sin, and the foundation from which the American economy was initially built. Not just that though, but it was a domestic theater of racial terror that helped define the nation after Reconstruction. It was a long-running campaign of public cruelty meant to discipline Black existence, crush Black ambition, erase Black citizenship, and remind Black communities that freedom on paper did not mean safety in practice.

The federal government knew. The Senate knew. The presidents knew. America knew. Still, it let it happen. That’s the forbidden truth about the United States. The foundation beneath the myth of “justice and equality for all.” Why would any conscious Black person willingly paricipate in a war to protect a nation whose history of brutality and barbarism agionst them has been perpetuasl since the birth of this nation? Fighting in a war? For who? who what cause? This is why this blog series must be written.

America can preach to anybody else around the globe about civilization, law, order, democracy, or human rights, it must answer for the killing fields it allowed here at home. America did not merely fail Black people during the lynching era. It protected the machinery of our slaughter. It gave killers time, cover, custom, and confidence. It allowed senators to filibuster our humanity, presidents to sidestep our suffering, and generations of white America to pretend that Black death was somebody else’s problem.

So no, Black people do not owe this country blind loyalty, automatic patriotism, or unthinking reverence for symbols that flew over our terror. A nation that let thousands be tortured and murdered without justice does not get to demand devotion from the descendants of the betrayed. They don’t get to request our blood for their wars to perpetuate a system that has never loved her Black citizens. Until America fully tells the truth, fully owns its guilt, and fully repairs what it deliberately allowed, every sermon it preaches about freedom is stained with the blood of Black Americans.

I’m Journalisty and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

Keiosha Felix was only 15 years old when she vanished from Duson, Louisiana on April 30, 2012. She was not just a missing teen. She was also a young mother. Her life matters, especially for her child, because any attempt to casually suggest that Keiosha simply “left” collapses under the weight of one brutal fact. She left behind her little girl. The FBI and other public case summaries still list her as missing, and nearly fourteen years later, there has still been no justice, no closure, and no honest accounting for how badly this case was handled.

From the beginning, this case carried the stench of failure. Public records shows that several people tied to Keiosha’s disappearance were arrested in 2012, including her aunt Patricia Andrus, her cousin Portia Felix, and Leon Wilkerson Jr., the boyfriend of Keiosha’s aunt. Public case summaries also state that Keiosha had allegedly accused Wilkerson of sexually assaulting her before she disappeared. there also were rumors that Wilkerson may have fathered Keiosha’s child. Those are not small details. They’re flashing red lights that should have sent state case workers into action, if only to insure the protection of a teen mother under state custody.

The weekend before she vanished, Keiosha got a weekend pass to visit her paternal aunt Patricia Andrus. She was last seen leaving Patricia’s Duson, Louisiana home. She has never been seen or heard from again. Keiosha was initially classified as a runaway just as most cases involving missing Black kids are. She had run away once in the past, but she was back after two days. Additionally, Patricia’s daughter (Keiosha’s cousin) Portia Felix claimed to have heard from Keiosha after April 30th, and that Keiosha allegedly said she was “just fine”.  Yet, despite arrests, headlines, and all the noise that surrounded this case, Keiosha was never found.

However, many relatives on Keiosha’s mother’s side have stated that Keiosha would not leave her one-year-old daughter behind. Keiosha was also a frequent social media user, yet she had not accessed any of her social media accounts since the day she was last seen.That information makes the case even more alarming and creates suspicion whether something happened to the teen. There should also be public outrage, not because it was another missing Black teen, but because the manner in which the teen’s case was fumbled by the authorities.

It all of three months, before Keiosha was reclassified as an endangered missing person. Throughout the investigation, the Duson Police Department learned more information about Keiosha’s relationship with her aunt Patricia and Patricia’s boyfriend, Leon Wilkerson Jr. It was discovered that prior to her disappearance, Keiosha had allegedly told her aunt Patricia that Leon had sexually assaulted her. Patricia never reported this to the authorities, nor did she tell investigators about it after Keiosha went missing. That alone should disturb anybody paying attention to this child’s case.

In July of the same year, Leon was arrested and charged with rape and second-degree kidnapping in connection with Keiosha’s disappearance. Patricia was arrested and charged with improper supervision of a minor and accessory to rape. Keiosha’s cousin Portia, who told investigators that she heard from Keiosha after her disappearance, was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice. Also,  in August 2012, Leon’s brother Ronald Wilkerson was also arrested and charged with kidnapping in connection with Keiosha’s case. It seemed that investigators were closer to getting their answers about what happened to Keiosha. Then, the following month, the investigation took an unexpected turn. This is where the focus from finding out what happened to a missing teen mother, shifted the following month, and the investigation took an unexpected turn

At that time, the Duson Police Department was handling the case, and the police chief was Frank Andrew. Lt. Gerald Credeur, who was then the assistant chief, was the lead investigator, but instead of this case moving toward truth, it spiraled into controversy. Credeur was suspiciously removed from the investigation, suspended, and later fired. Public records says he was accused of unlawful arrests, illegal searches and seizures, and false testimony. After that, the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office took over the case.

The Board of Alderman determined that Credeur did, in fact, make the searches and the arrests without probable cause and he was fired the following month. The charges against Leon and Ronald Wilkerson were dropped. The charges were eventually dropped against Andrus and Felix also. This leaves so many unanswered questions related to this missing teen case. Did Lt. Credeur botch the case on his own? What did Credeur falsely testify about? What basis were the Wilkerson brothers arrest on? Were the rape allegations true? Did Patricia Andrus actually tell investigators that Keiosha told her about the alleged rape? Way too many unanswered questions, and it appears that the public has heard more about Credeur’s firing than the progress of the teen’s case.

When a missing child investigation turns into a mess of arrests, internal discipline, firings, and a transfer of control to another agency, that is not justice working smoothly. It’s a warning sign that something went terribly wrong. There have long been rumors that Chief Frank Andrew may have had some relationship or connection to people initially arrested in the case. But based on the publicly available reporting I could verify, I did not find confirmed evidence establishing that Frank Andrew was related to those suspects. That point should be stated plainly and clearly. But,the rumor exists, it remains unverified in the sources I reviewed. What is verified is that the investigation became compromised, the lead investigator was fired, the case changed hands, and Keiosha Felix is still missing.

Whether the rot in this case came from incompetence, internal politics, bad police work, or something even darker, the result has been the same. A missing Black teenage mother has gone almost fourteen years without answers. That’s not just tragic. It’s disgraceful.

What makes this case feel even more troubling is what happened in August 2025. I personally made contact with former lead investigator Gerald Credeur. In our messages, he agreed to a telephone interview and even discussed timing, saying he would be willing to talk. But when the scheduled time came, it passed without a word from him. No call. No explanation. No follow-up. That silence does not prove wrongdoing, and I will not pretend it does. But in a case already soaked in unanswered questions, his failure to follow through only adds another layer of unease. It leaves the public to wonder: is it simple avoidance, or is there still fear about what might be said. or what might happen if people start talking too freely? That is food for thought.

Keiosha Felix was not some disposable child whose life should be buried beneath departmental drama, legal technicalities, and whispered rumors. She was a young girl. She was a mother. She was someone whose life mattered, and the system that should have protected her instead delivered confusion, contradiction, and collapse.Fourteen years later, the central truth remains unchanged, Keiosha Felix did not fail the system. The system failed Keiosha. Until the full truth comes out, the stain of that failure belongs not to the missing child, but to every institution and every adult who let this case drift into darkness. I remain committed to finding out what happened to Keiosha and will speak with anyone regarding her disappearance. there is something seriously rotten in the Louisiana justice system.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

It was exactly 58 years ago today. I was only 2 years old, in my mother’s arms as she held me near the third-floor window of her apartment in the 2200 block of Brookfield Avenue in West Baltimore. Mom and Dad were only 22-years-old. Outside, the city was in chaos. I remember people coming down our block carrying items they had looted from the business district up on Whitelock Avenue at the top of our street. I remember National Guardsmen walking down the middle of the block with rifles pointed in the air while clearing the street. I remember fires burning across the city. I remember fear. I remember unrest. I remember a country coming apart in real time at just 2-years-old.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated on April 4, 1968, and by April 8, the pain, rage, and hopelessness in Black communities had spilled into the streets. That era was not ancient history. It was in my generation. Too many people speak about the Civil Rights era as if it belongs to some long-dead America, as if racism was buried with the past, as if the hatred, exclusion, police abuse, economic deprivation, and racial contempt that fueled those uprisings somehow disappeared. It has not. We are not far removed from that America at all. In truth, many of its foundations and social ideologies are still standing.

What some white Americans still refuse to understand is that riots and looting do not happen in a vacuum. They are not born simply from “bad behavior,” moral failure, or some manufactured idea that Black people are naturally disorderly. That kind of thinking is itself rooted in racism. What happened in cities like Baltimore after Dr. King’s murder was the explosion of generations of injustice, neglect, humiliation, and pain.

When people are locked out of power, denied dignity, brutalized by the systems sworn to protect them, and then told to remain peaceful while their lives are treated as disposable, eventually something breaks. Yet, even today, some still talk about the rioting and looting of 1968 with more outrage than they ever speak about the racism that gave birth to it. That’s the hypocrisy.

They condemn the response, but remain silent about the conditions. They criticize broken windows, but not broken humanity. They mourn property, but rarely mourn the decades of racial terror, segregation, disinvestment, and systemic abuse that made those streets a powder keg in the first place. That’s why America still struggles with race now. Too many people want the comfort of reconciliation without the truth of accountability. Too many want racial peace without racial justice. Too many want to lecture Black communities about behavior, while refusing to confront the historical and present-day forces that have poisoned relationships between the races for generations.

If we truly want to live better together, then honesty has to come first. We must tell the truth about what racism has done to this country. We must tell the truth about why cities burned. We must tell the truth about how white supremacy shaped housing, schools, policing, employment, and opportunity. We must tell the truth that racial wounds do not heal just because time has passed.

Living better together requires more than slogans. It requires empathy. It requires humility. It requires that people stop asking only, “Why were they rioting?” and start asking, “What kind of nation creates the conditions where despair and rage become that deep?” That is the real question we should be asking.

My memory of Baltimore in flames is not just a memory of destruction. It is a memory of unresolved pain in America. And 58 years later, this country still has not fully dealt with the sickness that put those flames in the streets.

We are not far removed from that racism. We are still wrestling with it. Still suffering from it. Still being divided by it. Until this nation develops the courage to understand the why behind the anger, not just condemn the anger itself, we will keep repeating the same cycles under different names.

Dr. King is gone. The smoke from 1968 has long cleared. But the moral failure that helped ignite it still lingers, and that should disturb every one of us.

Relisha Rudd should be 20 years old today. She should be living her life, chasing her future, laughing, growing, and becoming the young woman she was never given the chance to be. Instead, more than 12 years after she vanished from a community shelter in Washington, D.C., Relisha is still missing, her case is still unsolved, and this country still has no answers for what happened to an 8-year-old Black child who disappeared in plain sight.

Relisha was last seen on March 1, 2014. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children still lists her as missing, and the FBI still offers a $25,000 dollar reward for information leading to her location and return. That alone says everything that needs to be said. The years have simply passed, the headlines have faded, but Relisha has still not been found. This should trouble every adult with children.

There is something especially cruel about the passage of time in cases like this. Every birthday becomes another open wound. Every year that goes by is another reminder that a vulnerable child vanished, and the system that should have protected her couldn’t. Relisha’s name should have never become a symbol of neglect, indifference, and institutional failure, but that’s exactly what happened. Her disappearance exposed a devastating truth, that some children are failed long before they are ever reported missing.

Let’s tell the truth plainly. If this had been a child of a different ethnicity, from a different background, this case would have drawn outrage on a national level. Relisha Rudd was a little Black girl, and like far too many missing Black children, her pain never received the sustained national urgency it deserved. Her life mattered. Her disappearance matters, and the fact that she remains missing in 2026 (12 years later) is a moral indictment of a society that too often looks away when Black children vanish.

Today, Relisha would be 20. That fact is as heartbreaking as it is infuriating. Because behind that number is the life she never got to live. She is a child who was supposed to be protected. Behind that number is a family still waiting, still hurting, still carrying the unbearable weight of not knowing what happened to her.

The sad reality is not just that Relisha Rudd disappeared. It’s that she still has not been found after all these years, after all the public promises, and until she is found. This case remains an open wound, not just for her family, but for every person who still believes missing children deserve more than candlelight memorials, faded posters, and empty words. Relisha Rudd would be 20 now, and America still owes that little girl answers.

The Suspicious Adults Around Her Still Cast a Dark Shadow

This case has always carried a deeply disturbing cloud over it, because the circumstances around the adults in Relisha’s life were troubling from the beginning. Authorities say Relisha was last seen with Kahlil Tatum, a 51-year-old shelter janitor who had become close to her family while they were living at the D.C. General shelter. He was not some random stranger who crossed her path for a moment. He was someone who had access, familiarity, trust, and that makes this case even more chilling.

The suspiciousness surrounding the situation only deepens from there. NBC Washington reported that Relisha’s mother had allowed Tatum to take her, and police said Tatum even posed as a doctor to explain Relisha’s absence from school. On top of that, no one, not family, not shelter staff, nor school officials reported Relisha missing until March 19, even though she had already been out of school for weeks. Those are not small details. They are the kinds of facts that leave the public asking hard, painful questions about who knew what, who ignored what, and how a vulnerable little girl was allowed to slip so far out of sight.

Then there is Tatum himself, the so-called family friend at the center of this nightmare. The FBI says authorities believed Relisha was with him before he was later found dead. Investigators also searched intensely after video showed Relisha with him at a D.C. motel, and reporting from local news outlets said that investigators believe he killed her before taking his own life, even though her body has never been recovered. That is a brutal, unfinished horror of this case. The man at the center of suspicion is dead, but Relisha is still missing, and the truth was buried with too many unanswered questions.

This is why Relisha Rudd’s case still stings so deeply. It is not only the tragedy of a missing child. It is the tragedy of a child surrounded by adults, systems, and circumstances that all raised red flags and yet she still vanished. The suspicious behavior, the delayed reporting, the false explanations and the easy access this older man had to her life! All of it paints a picture that is as enraging as it is heartbreaking.

Relisha would be 20 now. She should be somewhere living, growing, becoming. Instead, she is still missing, still waiting to be found, and still waiting for the full truth to come to light. That’s the sad reality and until she is brought home, this case remains an indictment of every person and every system that failed to protect her.

I’m Journalist And Blogger David B. Adams\

The People’s Champion Blog

When Iran nationalized its oil in 1953, it committed the unforgivable sin of telling Western powers that its wealth belonged to its own people. That was never going to be tolerated by colonizers lusting to conquer Mideastern wealth. So in 1953, the United States and Great Britain helped crush Iran’s leadership within it’s sovereign and democratic nation, removed Mohammad Mossadegh (who was democratically elected) from power, jailed him, and propped up the Shah of Iran, a ruler many saw as an American puppet placed in Iran to protect foreign interests, not Iranian freedom.

For years, Iran lived under that arrangement, with its resources and future tied to the demands of outside powers. Then in 1979, the pressure finally exploded. The Iranian people revolted and Revolution came, the Shah fell, and 66 American hostages were initially taken (14 of those hostages were African-American and were released by the Iranians). But that hostage crisis did not come out of nowhere. it didn’t start at the front gate of the U.S. Embassy. It came out of years of foreign interference, control, and the bitterness that grows when a nation and it’s indigenous people are denied the right to truly govern themselves.

This is the part that Western Media and powerful Zionist has never wanted said too loudly. Instead, our Zionist controlled media has always painted the Iranians, those of Mideastern ethnicity, and just about any foreign civilization resisting and refusing to bow to Western Imperialism, as terrorist or fanatical. It’s not difficult to see how America’s enemies are always other countries with vast resources imperative to Western interest. They are always the bad guys while America never paints herself as the bully.

More importantly. the struggle over Iran has never just been about diplomacy, peace, or security. It has always been about oil, power, and who gets to control both (the old Imperial playbook mirroring the colonization of other mineral and natural resource enriched nations). The rich and the Western elite have been chasing the control over Iranian resources ever since Iran tried to take its own wealth back. What we are seeing today is not some new conflict. It is the continuation of an old one, rooted in greed, impirialism, and the refusal to let Iran stand fully on its own.

Let the record be told clearly, plainly, and pray that the lives of young serviceman won’t fall as ponds in a war rooted in the pursuit of wealth by the Western Imperialist.

I’m Journalist David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States, yet far too many children can go missing here without the kind of nonstop national alarm their disappearances should trigger. For Black children especially, the silence often feels even louder. Their faces do not always dominate the news cycle. Their names do not always trend. Their families do not always get the public urgency they deserve. But the Metropolitan Police Department’s own missing persons page makes one thing painfully clear: this crisis is not imagined. It is real, it is present, and it has names.

As of March 30, 2026, the juvenile names listed on the Metropolitan Police Department’s “Currently Missing” page include Kimora White, 13; Joshua Quigley, 15; Malaysia Allen, 12; ARi Talley, 17; Khalil Hall, 16; Laynya Fitzhugh, 16; Jamiyah Davis, 14; Yaniza Almendarez-Zecena, 15; Paige Doye, 15; Janelle Thomas, 17; Zori Johnson, 12; Micah Carrington, 17; Amari Wilson, 16; Delayja Stewart, 14; Kyon Jones, 2 months; and Relisha T. Rudd, 8. MPD’s page also shows when they were reported missing, with several posted in March 2026 alone. D.C. Metropolitan Police Missing

Read those names slowly.

Kimora White. Malaysia Allen. Khalil Hall. Laynya Fitzhugh. Jamiyah Davis. Zori Johnson. Micah Carrington. Amari Wilson. Delayja Stewart. Relisha Rudd.

These are not talking points. These are not passing blurbs for people to scroll past. These are someone’s children. And every single name should be forcing a larger public reckoning about how this country responds when young people, especially Black children, go missing.

What’s troubling is how easy it is for the public to become numb. A police webpage updates. A new flier appears. Another child’s name is added. Then the day moves on as though this is normal. But there is nothing normal about a city carrying this many missing juvenile cases on a public law-enforcement page. There is nothing normal about that at all.

To be clear, MPD says the page is updated daily and that information changes in real time as missing people are reported and found. The department also notes that fliers are removed when a missing person is located. That matters. Accuracy matters. But even with that reality, the larger question still stands. Why does it take so little to make these children disappear from public conversation, even when they have not yet returned home? That’s where the real indictment should begin.

America has a long and ugly habit of deciding which missing children deserve saturation coverage and which ones get a fraction of that concern. Some children become household names. Others remain trapped on police websites, known mainly to grieving families, local advocates, and whoever happens to stumble across their photo online. That disparity is not accidental. It reflects whose innocence is centered, whose pain is amplified, and whose disappearances are treated like emergencies rather than routine entries in a database.

The name Relisha T. Rudd should still haunt this city. MPD’s page lists her as missing since March 1, 2014. That’s over 12 years. Her case should have permanently changed the way Washington responds to missing children. It should have created a culture of sustained vigilance. Instead, too often the lesson seems to have been forgotten, while more names continue to appear.

That is why these names must be said. That is why these children must be seen. Naming the missing is one way of resisting the silence that too often swallows them. Every flier represents a family living in fear. Every date on that page marks another day of uncertainty, another day without answers, another day a child remains out of sight and, too often, out of the public mind.

Washington, D.C. should not be comfortable with this. The nation should not be comfortable with this. The media should not be comfortable with this. The public should not be comfortable with this. These children deserve more than a webpage. They deserve headlines. They deserve urgency. They deserve organized public attention. And above all, they deserve to be found.

Young, Black, and missing in America should never be a normal condition. In Washington, D.C., it is a moral emergency.

I’m Journalist David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

Some family secrets do not stay buried because they are harmless. They stay buried because the truth is too disruptive to the story people have chosen to live with. I can’t image what was so horrible that our mother couldn’t tell us or face such truth in her life time. The sad reality is that we now may never know, but this is what we do know.

About fourteen years ago, a cousin appeared in our lives out of nowhere through social media. At first, it seemed like one of those unexpected family connections that time and distance had simply delayed. She and her mother shared photographs with me, and from the beginning they believed that my mother was her mother’s biological sister. As I looked through those images, I was stunned. The pictures of her mother’s mother were so strikingly familiar that I thought I was looking at photographs of my own mother. But I wasn’t.

That woman was supposed to be my Aunt Jean (a woman I had heard about, but never met). You see Jean was the younger sister of a woman name Dorothy, who we were taught was our mother’s biological mother (despite the fact mom and Dorothy had no physical resemblamce whatsoever). And as it turned out, Jean was not just some distant relative floating around in family lore. Jean was my mother’s biological mother, not Dorothy. Let that settle in for a moment. For nearly 70 years, the truth had been buried beneath silence, omission, deflection, and what now feels like a coordinated effort to keep a family secret alive at all costs, and those we we had grown to love and trust, were the very people perpetrating this fraud.

What makes this story even more haunting is that the signs were there before this cousin ever appeared. About three years earlier, I had found my mother’s birth record. That record raised questions I could not shake, it sparked debate and an ugly fued between siblings, because the woman we had always been taught was our biological grandmother was not listed on the birth document. Jean’s name was listed as her mother. From that day forward, a quiet suspicion began to grow in me, and I wondered had my mother been adopted, hidden, or passed off under a false family narrative?

Now years after finding her birth record, my suspicion was no longer a theory. It had a face. It had names. It had bloodlines. It had photographs. It had witnesses. More importantly, it had lie and deceit written all over it. Yet, instead of truth, all we keep getting from the older generation is the same tired response, lies, evasion, or some version of “it’s best to leave the past in the past.” No. It is not best, at least in my mind.

That phrase has been used for generations to protect the comfort of adults in our family at the expense of the emotional well-being of their children and grandchildren. “Leave it in the past” usually means protect the lie, preserve appearances, and ignore the wreckage the secret has caused in the lives of everyone forced to live in such confusion.

Whether people are willing to acknowledge it or not, secrets like this do cause damage. They damage identities.They damage trust we learn to develop. They damage a person’s sense of belonging and they damage how people understand themselves, where they come from, and who they are connected to. When a family hides the truth about a mother’s origins for nearly seven decades, that is not some small private matter. It’s like the theft of history. It’s the manipulation of lineage and the denial of a person’s right to know their own blood, their own story, their own inheritance of truth.

However, what is perhaps most painful is not just that the secret was kept, but that even now, when the evidence has surfaced, so many still choose dishonesty over healing. They refuse to set my siblings and I free. Everyone involved in the actions that may have caused the birth of such deception are now gone. What is left to protect? The choice tp continuously deny us the truth says something.

It says that some people within our own family have become so invested in a lie that they begin to treat truth as a real threat. It says that preserving an old family myth matters more to them than the emotional injury caused by decades of deception. It also says that accountability is unwelcome, even when silence has clearly done more harm than honesty ever could. What exactly were they protecting? Reputation? Shame? Scandal? The sensibilities of dead people? Whatever the reason, one truth remains. When adults bury the truth, the children inherit the confusion for generations.

The kind of confusion I am talking about is not abstract. It lives in the questions that never got answered. The lives in the relationships that were never formed. The years stolen from people who could have known one another honestly. It lives in the emotional disorientation of discovering that parts of your family tree were deliberately hidden from you. You can’t imagine the anger that comes when you realize that what you were taught as fact your entire life, may have simply been fiction all along.

There is also a level of cruelty in being told, after we have made such a discovery, that the truth no longer matters, we should leave well enough alone, because too much time has passed. Time does not erase harm. Silence does not sanctify deception, and age does not excuse betrayal. If anything, the length of time makes the betrayal heavier. Nearly 70 years?

Seventy years of a hidden maternal truth. Seventy years of people knowing, or suspecting, and refusing to speak plainly. Seventy years of allowing future generations to build their identity on an incomplete or false foundation. Did they think they were protecting someone or something from harm? That is not protection. That is generational damage that we have all suffered and continue to bleed into later generations.

Families often talk about legacy as if it is only about good names, old photographs, family reunions, and sentimental stories. But legacy is also about truth. Legacy is honesty. Legacy is whether you leave your children clarity or confusion. Whether you pass down courage or cowardice. Whether you hand them roots, or force them to dig through lies just to find the soil they came from.

What happened here is not just a family matter. It is a lesson in what silence can do. It’s proof that secrets do not disappear. They wait. They surface. They echo and when they do, they do not just expose the original lie. They also expose every person in the family who helped keep it alive. I do not accept that the truth should be buried simply because it is old. I do not accept that bloodlines should be hidden for the sake of convenience of others or their dignity. Nor do I accept that descendants should be denied answers because previous generations found deception easier than honesty.

I certainly do not accept the idea that asking questions is somehow more offensive than the lies that were told themselves. If the older generation wants to “leave it in the past,” that is their choice. But some of us are trying to reclaim what was taken from us. We deserve to know the truth, our true identity, and the right to know our own family story without filters, omissions, and manufactured myths.

A nearly 70-year-old secret is not just old news. It’s old damage. Sadly, the people still protecting it need to understand that silence may have preserved their comfort, or that of other relatives, but it has come at the cost of some within this generation’s peace.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

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