The Missing Bonneville: The Unanswered Killing of Lakeisha Streety

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A Friday in Walnut Hills

Friday, March 10, 2006, ended in an apartment on Stanton Avenue in the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati. Inside the home at 2812 Stanton Avenue, 28-year-old Lakeisha Streety was found dead. Cincinnati police treated her death as a homicide from the start, and within a day they were asking the public for help. More than two decades later that request has never been answered. No one has been arrested, no one has been charged, and her name is still on the Ohio Attorney General's list of unsolved homicides. The family she left behind still lives with the same questions they had that night. Who came into her home, why did they kill her, and where did her car go?

Who Lakeisha Was

Lakeisha Renee Streety was born in Ohio on June 14, 1977. She grew up in a large Cincinnati family, the daughter of Ronald Keith Muhammad and Felita Renee Muhammad and the sister of Keith Streety. By 2006 she was a mother of two, a son who was nine and a daughter, Jameela, who was eight. Her family's memorial lists a long line of aunts, uncles and a grandmother, the kind of extended family that turns out for birthdays and holidays and that has kept her memory alive since. When reporters returned to her case years later, the words her relatives used were about her as a mother first. She was a young woman with children to raise and a life still taking shape, and that life was taken inside the one place she should have been safest.

The Discovery

It was her brother, Keith, who found her. He came to the apartment with her two children and found Lakeisha dead in her bed. The children were with him at the time. It is hard to imagine a worse way for a family to learn what happened, and Keith later told FOX19 that it had been a hard ordeal to go through and that the family was still trying to heal. Officers responding to the 2800 block of Stanton Avenue found her body inside the apartment, and detectives took over a scene that would quickly prove difficult. The moment that began this case was not a public one. It was a brother and two young children walking into a home and finding a sister and a mother gone.

How She Died

The first news reports in March 2006 were rushed out over a weekend and described Lakeisha as having been shot. The record that followed told a different story. The Ohio Attorney General's unsolved homicide file says she was strangled to death inside her home, and Cincinnati police records cited by FOX19 say she was stabbed and strangled, with detectives describing her death as the result of homicidal violence. Her memorial records that police found her stabbed in her apartment. Whatever the first reports said, the official files agree that this was a violent, personal killing carried out at close quarters. It was not a stray bullet or a crime from the street outside. Someone was in that apartment with her, and someone used their hands and a blade to end her life.

A Scene That Had Been Cleaned

One detail her family has spoken about publicly is especially chilling. Relatives told FOX19 that whoever killed Lakeisha cleaned up the scene afterward. Her daughter, Jameela Zyyon, put it plainly years later, saying that he, or she, literally cleaned up the scene. A killer who takes time to clean up after a murder is not someone who panicked and ran. It suggests someone who stayed in the apartment after Lakeisha was dead, who thought about what might be left behind, and who tried to erase it. For investigators that kind of care can remove the very evidence they would normally rely on. For a family it is one more painful sign that whoever did this was calm enough to stay.

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