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Akia Eggleston was eight months pregnant when she vanished before her baby shower. (HANDOUT)
Akia Eggleston had a young daughter and was about eight months into a grueling pregnancy as summer approached in 2017.
Moving past some of the depression she experienced earlier in her term, the 22-year-old was planning a baby shower to celebrate. The Cherry Hill resident picked out a venue and sent out invitations with pink bubble letters to friends and family. She’d scheduled an appointment to have her hair done the day before the shower, May 7.
Around the same time, Eggleston seemed to be making progress in the tumultuous relationship she had with the unborn baby’s father, Michael Robertson. Court records show he communicated with her about moving in together, asking her to withdraw cash for a deposit on an apartment shortly after sending her blurry pictures of the place.
The regular contact she kept with friends through phone calls, messages and posts on Facebook ended abruptly around 5:22 p.m. May 3, 2017. The last message she sent was an invite to the baby shower neither she nor Robertson would attend. According to authorities, nobody has heard from Eggleston since that day.
After that, Assistant State’s Attorney Kurt Bjorklund said in court Wednesday, “Akia Eggleston ceased to exist.”
It took Baltimore Police and FBI investigators about 4 1/2 years from the date Eggleston went missing to make a case against Robertson and charge him with two counts of murder — one for Eggleston, one for the unborn baby. In charging documents, police wrote the length of Eggleston’s pregnancy meant there was a “reasonable likelihood of the fetus’ viability, that is, its sustained survival outside the womb.”
About six years and two months after Eggleston disappeared, Robertson’s trial began in earnest Wednesday
Police never found an expectant mother from Baltimore. Without her body, the unborn baby’s father stands trial for murder.
Police never found Akia Eggleston, an expectant mother who went missing from Baltimore in 2017. Six years later, the father of her unborn baby began standing trial for her murder.
www.baltimoresun.com