More than a decade after Unique Harris, a 24-year-old mother of three, vanished from her Southeast Washington apartment while her children were asleep, an acquaintance of hers went on trial in D.C. Superior Court, accused of killing the still-missing woman out of jealousy and disposing of her body.
“He stole her from her family and he made sure we’d never find her, and we haven’t,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Vinet Bryant told the jury Tuesday in her opening statement. Gesturing to the defendant,
Isaac Moye, now 46, Bryant said, “But we found him.”
A few months after the 10-year anniversary of
Harris’s disappearance, Moye, who had been questioned by police repeatedly over the previous decade, was arrested in December 2020 and charged with second-degree murder.
One of his attorneys, Candace Mitchell, scoffed at the prosecution’s mostly circumstantial case against her client and criticized D.C. police in her opening statement, saying they prematurely eliminated other possible suspects in an “incompetent and irresponsible investigation.” Arresting Moye, she said, was “an easy solution to a question that, to this day, they cannot answer: What happened to Unique Harris.”