Too little, Too late: A mistake that caused a little girl her life

Chicago Police are promising a thorough review to determine why the department did not alert the news media about a missing girl who turned up murdered two weeks later. They are deciding whether it was a computer glitch or human error that cause the lack of media coverage….and mishandling that resulted in death for 12 year old Jahmeshia Connor. No matter what the answer is, it will not bring this child back to her family.

Jahmeshia Conner

Jahmeshia was last seen getting on a bus on the south side Englewood neighborhood in Chicago. Her mother reported her missing the next day when she did not return home from school. The reason for the delay is that she thought her daughter was staying her Aunt that evening. But that was clearly not the case.

A flier was drawn up and allegedly sent through all the proper channels, but somehow it never reached the media….not until it was too late. Jahmeshia’s body was found two weeks later in an alley, one block from her mother’s home. She was strangled to death. Cops reportedly say she was probably dead less than two days before discovered by a passer-by.

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She was a nightclub dancer, a mother, an aspiring writer. And torn from the calendar where she kept her daily schedule was the month she disappeared: July 1996. Susan Walsh, who was 36 at the time, was last seen around noon on July 16, 1996. She told her estranged husband that she was headed to a pay phone a half-block from her apartment in Nutley, New Jersey. Walsh and her husband, Mark, had been home in their connecting apartments with their 11-year-old son, who was asleep, said Detective Lt. Steven Rogers of the Nutley Police Department. "No one actually saw her leave the house," said Rogers, who became involved in the case in 2003 when he was assigned to command the department's detective bureau. "No one saw her on the phone."