A young girl runs an errand and is found dead three hours later On the evening of October 1, 1971, 12-year-old Nenomoshia Yates, an African-American female known to her loved ones as 'Neno,' left her home on Benning Road in Southeast Washington, D.C. A sixth-grader at Kelly Miller Junior High School, she was sent on a simple errand to a nearby Safeway store to buy paper plates, sugar, and flour for her family. An employee at the grocery store later confirmed that Nenomoshia had purchased the items.
She never made it home.
It is believed she was abducted from the parking lot of the grocery store, which was less than a block from her house. One witness reported seeing a girl matching her description getting into a blue Volkswagen, but this lead never materialized into anything concrete. A mere three hours after she was last seen, a 16-year-old hitchhiker made a grim discovery on the side of Pennsylvania Avenue in Prince George's County, Maryland: Nenomoshia's body.
An investigation revealed she had been sexually assaulted and strangled with such violence that her esophagus was broken. She was found fully clothed, but her shoes were missing. Investigators also found unidentified green fibers on her clothing, a detail that would become a recurring clue in a string of similar tragedies.
Nenomoshia's murder was one of six unsolved killings of young Black girls in the Washington, D.C. area between April 1971 and September 1972. The media dubbed the unknown assailant the 'Freeway Phantom,' as the victims' bodies were often found near major roadways. Over the years, several suspects have been considered, including a group known as the 'Green Vega Rapists' and two former police officers, but no arrests have ever been made in connection with Nenomoshia's death. The case remains cold, and a substantial reward is still offered for information leading to the arrest of the person or persons responsible for her death and the deaths of the other young victims.
