Danielle Locklear, 15, disappeared on March 11, 2014
Danielle Locklear. PHOTO: FACEBOOK
On the evening of March 11, 2014, Danielle Locklear, 15, told her grandfather she had plans to visit a friend, who lived close by.
When the South View High School freshman didn’t return home, her grandfather reported her missing two days later, on March 13, per the Fayetteville Observer.
Her shocking disappearance in Hope Mills, N.C., led to an intense search that involved local, state and federal investigators, according to the Observer. Community members, including the teen’s boyfriend Je’Michael Malloy, a high school senior who lived in nearby Fayetteville, also took part in the searches, ABC 11 reported.
The case took a chilling turn less than a month after she vanished when Malloy, then 17, confessed that he killed the teen, who he had been dating since June 2013.
“It’s been a month-long nightmare, and I feel like they’ve been around us. They’ve been in our home. He’s walked with us on searches. We’re disgusted,” Locklear’s aunt, Chena Simmons, told ABC 11 at the time. “And to find out that the perpetrator, or the person who took her life allegedly is her own boyfriend, is a lot to take. It’s a lot. We can’t deal with it.”
Je’Michael Malloy. PHOTO: CUMBERLAND COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE
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“All I can say is that this is a tragic event, for the family of the victim for the families of the suspect,” Hope Mills Police Chief Joel Acciardo said, according to the Observer. “Everybody involved was young. Everybody involved had their whole lives ahead of them.”
Malloy admitted he choked the teen during a fight at a local creek hangout on March 11, stuffing a sock in her mouth, per the Observer.
He and his friend Dominic Tayvon Lock, 18, then disposed of her body in the South River in Cumberland County.
Authorities said cinder blocks were used to weigh down her body, which was discovered on April 2 at the bottom of the river, per FOX 8.
Malloy pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 to 31 years in prison in 2016 for the killing, WRAL reported.
Danielle Locklear. PHOTO: FACEBOOK
At his sentencing, Danielle’s mother, Rowna Fowler, told Malloy, “You ripped out my soul.”
“I can’t watch my baby get her high school diploma,” she said, according to FOX 8. “I can’t watch her get married. That was my only one, I can’t have any more children, Je’Michael. You took that away from me.”
Lock, who drove the couple to the creek and helped dispose of the body, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to first-degree murder in 2015, per WNCT.
Fowler also spoke at Lock’s sentencing in 2016.
“I went to a funeral home and they pulled my child out of the freezer and I had to look at her in a plastic bag because they wouldn’t even open it,” she said, according to FOX8.
Lock was released from prison nearly eight and a half years later, per FOX8.
Malloy, now 28, is projected to be released in 2040, according to the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction.
