Family of SC mother missing 5 months hopes billboards will spur leads into what happened
The search has involved sheriff’s deputies, the FBI, activists, missing persons organizations, even psychics and yet Alexis Ware, a young Greenville mother, has not been found, five months after she disappeared.
Her family hopes a new billboard on one of Greenville County’s busiest thoroughfares, Woodruff Road, will bring in more leads.
Justin Hunt, a moderator with the South Carolina Black Activist Coalition who was not involved in putting up the billboard but has fostered many searches, said Friday the case “is as dry as you can get.”
He said his group has traced every lead they had. Nothing.
Ware, 29, a hairdresser, was last seen Jan. 30 at a gas station in Anderson County, where she met T.J. Patterson, the father of her youngest child, around 7:30 p.m. He took his child and Ware’s other child. He told investigators he thought they all were going to his mother’s house, but at a red light, Ware went around him and sped off.
Ware’s mother, Alberta Gray Simpson, said Thursday at a candlelight vigil announcing the billboard that she picks up the phone all the time to call her.
Ware’s aunt Katrina Gray said, “We will never stop looking.”
The billboard was paid for by the Black and Missing Foundation, which intends to erect another in Anderson County.
The Black and Missing Foundation was started by Derrica and Natalie Wilson to bring awareness to Black people who are missing because law enforcement and national media do not give those cases the attention they do white people.
Cases involving black people take four times as long to solve as those of white people, the organization said on its website.
The family is offering a $5,000 reward.
Ware’s mother has said previously she believed her daughter was kidnapped.
“She was too nice,” Gray said. “I feel she misjudged this person.”
Kevin Wheeler, spokesman for the FBI Columbia field office, said his office has provided technical support to the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office. He declined to say specifically what that entailed..
Capt. Steve Reeves of the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office could not be immediately reached for comment on the case.
On the day Gray went missing, she told her mother someone in a black truck was outside her Greenville apartment.
Ware’s phone recorded her location 30 miles away in Abbeville at 8:15 p.m. Jan. 30 and highway cameras picked up her car that same night going into Augusta, Georgia, and returning to South Carolina, Gray said.
The next Wednesday, Feb. 2, her red Honda was found covered in mud on a rural road in McCormick County, 70 miles from where Patterson last saw her.
Grays said her daughter’s cell phone and purse were inside the car.
Gray said investigators have told her they were able to get fingerprints from the car, but they have not told whether the prints belonged to Ware or someone else.
Anderson County deputies, along with multiple other agencies, have searched the 222 acres near where Ware’s car was found, but turned up nothing. The car was taken to Anderson County, and processed, and the lead investigator has phone records to peruse.
