Shaniya Davis Case

On November 16, 2009, Fayetteville, North Carolina Police found the body of a missing 5-year-old, Shaniya Davis, with the help of assisting volunteers. Shaniya Davis was reported missing by her mother, Antoinette Davis, on November 10, 2009. Shaniya Davis was last seen on the security video at the Comfort Suites hotel in Sanford along with a man that was identified as Mario McNeill. McNeill was charged with first-degree kidnapping three days after the 5-year-old was reported missing. Antoinette Davis was charged with accusations that she prostituted her daughter. Arrest warrants stated that Davis knowingly provided her daughter with the intent that she be held in sexual servitude and she permitted an act of prostitution.

Shaniya’s father

Highway 87. Law enforcement agents and volunteers searched the area around six miles from the last sighting of the child. Volunteers found the body about one hundred feet off of Walker Road. The man that found her said that she was lying on the ground wearing only a T-shirt and striped underwear. The preliminary autopsy report showed that Shaniya died of asphyxiation. Three days after finding the body, police charged a family acquaintance, Mario McNeill, for the

The agent stated that they needed to keep McNeill talking in order to get a location for Shaniya. The agent says that McNeill was not telling the truth and that he continued to change his story. He would sometimes sigh, yawn, and even giggle. He was not taking the situation seriously. Although he initially stated that he did not know the child, he later told police that Shaniya’s aunt sent him a text messages that asked him to pick up the 5-year-old from the family’s house – his phone log proved this to be false. He said the hotel was only a place for the two to wait. The agent stated that McNeill was going to take Shaniya to a dry cleaner to meet unidentified people.

Later, police was able to link the soil found in McNeill’s car to the soil at the dumping site. An FBI agent analyzed McNeill’s cell phone records and testified that calls that were made to and from the phone placed him in the area where the child lived at about three o’clock a.m. and showed him at the motel about four hours later. Around eight-thirty that morning, the cell phone’s signal bounced off of a tower near North Carolina 87, which is about six miles from where the body was