12 years later: Calls for answers in teen's murder

COBBS CREEK - September 8, 2010

About 30 relatives and friends carried makeshift signs and banners and marched down Baltimore Avenue towards Cobbs Creek Park.

It was there 12 years ago on August 30th that 15-year-old Lakeisha Jones was found strangled; her body was dumped in a wooded area.

Even now, it remains very painful for Lakeisha's family members as police make no headway in the case.

At the time, homicide investigators said there were no signs of sexual assault or anything other than the girl was strangled by someone with their bare hands for no known reason.

"They told me themselves they had DNA under her fingernails. Who do it belong to? It belongs to somebody," Lakeisha's aunt Cassandra Gibbons said.

Although no suspects were ever named by police, sources say the Lakeisha's mom's boyfriend refused to take a lie detector test.

Meanwhile, the teen's mother failed 3 lie detector tests. She declined to speak with Action News.

When Action News asked relatives who they think may have been responsible they said someone right around them.

"They are right here now. They didn't move nowhere. They right here somewhere. We just don't know," Valda Gibbons, another aunt of Lakeisha's, said.

"I'm looking for justice. If I got to go through and get it, then that's what it's going to be too, but I'm gonna get justice," Lakeisha's father Jason Gibbons said.

On a path at Cobbs Creek Park near the site where the teen's body was dumped, the group gathered in a circle and prayed.

"I don't want the city to think that we forgot about her, because we haven't. But we want the detectives to do their job because they had been working with us," Cassandra said.

So 12 years later, who did it and why remains a mystery.

What is known is that some relatives have their suspicions.

Emotions are running as high now as they did 12 years ago on that hot August night in Cobbs Creek.

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