Linda Howard’s eyes were wet, as though she hadn’t stopped crying in a week. Her answers were sometimes one word — “yes” or “no.” As she met with reporters Thursday morning in a Decatur lawyer’s office, she said she had little choice but to take her pain and loss public.
Otherwise, her daughter, Monica Renee Bowie, who is missing and apparently abducted, would be forgotten.
“Once the media stops, it’s hard to start it again,” Howard said.
Bowie, 34, was taken from her apartment complex in DeKalb County on the night of July 5. Neighbors said they heard her scream: “Someone help! I need help! Help me!” Investigators found evidence of a struggle in the parking lot. The next day, the car used in her abduction was found torched.
On Saturday, DeKalb County police arrested Jasper Keels, 24, charging him with theft by taking of the car and drug possession. Police said they don’t know whether there’s a connection between Keels and Bowie’s abduction. Howard and family members, meantime, are clinging to hope — and hoping her abductors are listening.
“Just let her go,” she said Thursday, surrounded by family members in the office of attorney Gerald Griggs. “Let her go. This is affecting the whole world. … It could have been a mistake on their [abductors] part. It could have been a mistake. Let her go anonymously.”
Howard said she and her family don’t believe Bowie’s fiancé, Shernotta Walters, 35, was involved in her daughter’s abduction. Walters and Bowie were arrested June 20 in an incident involving drugs and a gun found in a car. The charges were dropped. But police have questioned Walters about the abduction, said Walters’ attorney, Dennis Scheib.
Walters, who remains in the Fulton County jail because possession of a gun is a violation of his parole, didn’t know the gun or drugs were in the car, said Scheib. He said he also was not worried that Bowie would testify against him.
“She [Bowie] told me she would testify for him,” said Scheib, who described Walters as very upset about her abduction.
Howard said her daughter loved Atlanta since moving here from Pittsburgh about four years ago.
“She felt real confident down here,” said Howard, who described her daughter as a honor student with an upbeat attitude about life. “She didn’t allow negative things around her. That was her. She was a go-getter from the first day she learned to walk.”
Bowie owns two businesses in Atlanta: Go2girls, a hip-hop production company; and LaCoca Wear Clothing, a boutique off Metropolitan Avenue and Southwest Atlanta, Griggs and Howard said. Griggs confirmed that she also worked as a stripper for several months after her arrival in the city.
“She was like a lot of young ladies that come to Atlanta,” Griggs said. “She was trying to make ends meet, but she had gotten out of that life.”
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Search for Monica Renee Bowie continues
