Neighbors have been searching for weeks and now they fear the worst.
Police found a woman's body in an alley in Northeast DC. They suspect it's Joni Sharette Rockingham, 53, a mother of three grown children, and they think she was murdered.
It was the outcome friends and family feared the most. Rockingham walked out of her mom's house the day before Thanksgiving without her purse and disappeared.
Her friends and family searched and plastered missing posters her everywhere they could.
“She was a person make you laugh all the time, clown all the time,” said her sister, Trina Rockingham.
Almost three weeks after she disappeared, a neighbor spotted a woman's body -- yet to be positively identified -- next to a garbage can behind an abandoned home on 34th St. “It looks very suspicious right now,” said DC Police Chief Peter Newsham. “We'll have to wait for an autopsy.”
Neighbors say they searched the alley and the driveway repeatedly. They say she was not here up until now. ‘We think somebody dumped her, definitely, because she was not laying (there), said Rockingham’s friend April King.
Could she have been held and then murdered? Still a mystery.
“I just believe she put up a struggle. And I'm hoping and believing that some DNA is going to show up somewhere,” said a neighbor, Connie Dickens.
Her sister says it’s going to be a horrible Christmas. “That’s a sick person,” she said of the killer. “Because who is going to hold someone that long? Who does that?”
Police are promising to notify the family as soon as they know for sure. They're pleading for people to call investigators if they know anything.
