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Cosey was 16 years old at the time, and was in and out of the home several times that night. There was someone fighting for her attention outside. When everyone woke up in the morning, Cosey was gone.
“The door was cracked. Her coat and purse was gone. But her overnight bag was still there,” says Hill.
Police discovered an unlocked door, and decided that Cosey had run away, so they never searched for the girl, according to Hill.
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"Do I believe she left on her own with someone? Yes," says Hill. “But she was intending to come back. She was intending to come back home. She was not intending to stay gone for 10 years.”
Hill says there were signs someone had a hold on her daughter. She once saw her inside a dark sedan with a much older man. She worried her teenage girl was smoking marijuana, and says she once a discovered a fake ID that her daughter was using to sneak into local nightclubs.
Hill worries her daughter is the victim of sex-trafficking.
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Hill she broke down in tears the day she and her two other children moved, and the day she was forced to change the number to her cell phone.
“Yeah, it was very hard. I was in the store crying my eyes out. The number -- the only number that she knew. And I had to get all that changed. It's like, I always wonder, like, is she going to be able to find me? If she get away, she gotta find me.”
During her move, Hill found three notebooks with written messages her daughter had passed to a friend in class, just a few months before her daughter’s disappearance. In them, the 16-year-old talks about a boyfriend, and that she might be pregnant.
Hill has not given the notebooks to investigators.
“Why didn't they come to my house and search her room when she came up missing?” Hill says. “I mean, 'cause they didn't care. So why should I give these to them?"
Major Art Jackson, an African American officer at the Berkeley Police Department, tells us his team could use the notebooks, and cites them as an example of the strained relationship that law enforcement has with the family. But police also report that calls are now starting to come in about Shemika, after all these years.
“Two weeks ago, we got -- we got a call,” Major Jackson says. “And we're gonna follow up on any and all leads that we get.”
Mom searching for answers after daughter 'vanished without a trace' 10 years ago