Friends, family and the Kent Police all seem to come up with the same response about the disappearance three years ago of 21-year-old Alyssa McLemore.
“Nothing has changed in three years, sadly,” said Melissa Moore, a best friend of the Kent woman.
Kent detectives have three binders of information about McLemore since she went missing April 9, 2009.
“We review the investigation to date to see if there were things we missed,” said Detective Sgt. John Pagel. “There have not been any new leads that have panned out.”
McLemore was last heard from the evening of April 9 when her grandmother told her that McLemore’s mother was very ill. Her mother died three days after McLemore’s disappearance.
Detectives discovered early on in the investigation that at about 9:15 p.m. April 10, someone called 911 from McLemore’s cell phone. A female voice was heard asking for help before the call ended.
The phone did not have a Global Positioning System sensor, so the general location of where the call originated is unknown. The phone number listed on 911 records indicated McLemore as the owner of the phone. The phone was out of service a few days after the 911 call and no longer took phone messages.
“It was very unlike her not to be in communication with her family,” Pagel said.
Moore, of Bellevue, said there’s no way McLemore would walk away from her then-3-year-old daughter, her grandmother, mother or her sister. McLemore’s daughter splits time with the young girl’s father and the McLemore family.
“If she was able to be here, she’d be raising her daughter and be here for her family,” Moore said. “She wouldn’t choose not to be here.”
Detectives thought they might have a lead when they heard last year about a young woman’s body found in Lewis County but it wasn’t McLemore. An investigator with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office is familiar with McLemore’s case and keeps an eye out for any young women brought to the medical examiner that might match the description and clothing of McLemore, Pagel said.
McLemore reportedly was last seen by a witness near 30th Avenue South and Kent-Des Moines Road in Kent when she was approached by a pickup, but police don’t know who drove the pickup. The witness described the pickup as green, a 1990s model, possibly with an Oregon license plate.
A second witness told police that McLemore had been seen at an unspecified date prior to her disappearance with a white man in his 50s or 60s, about 5 feet 8 inches tall and 175 to 185 pounds. That man reportedly drives a green pickup and had some type of connection with McLemore.
Moore spent a lot of time initially spreading the word about McLemore in an effort to find her missing friend. But she said it became too time consuming as she tries to live her life and raise her own family.
A Facebook page updates information about McLemore. But three years later, there are more questions than answers.
McLemore, unemployed at the time of her disappearance, lived with her grandmother, mother and daughter in Kent. She attended Kent-Meridian High School for about a year before dropping out. Her grandmother has since moved to Auburn because she no longer needed such a big home.
“She (her grandmother) wanted to put the word out that the family has relocated to Auburn from Kent,” Moore said. “She’s concerned because if Alyssa goes to the home she always knew, they would not be home.”
Maybe one day answers will be found about what happened to Alyssa McLemore.
“There’s been tons of prayers,” Moore said.
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