“She loved us all. She always wanted to do everything for everybody,” he continued, his voice breaking with emotion.
But McHugh, said her siblings, had long struggled with alcohol, and began drinking at age 13 in part to cope with abuse she suffered growing up. McHugh managed to graduate high school, took business courses, worked, got married and had a baby girl she adored. But by her late 20s, McHugh also had a crack addiction, according to her siblings, and had begun sex work to pay for it.
“We all went through some stuff,” said James Abbott, McHugh’s half-brother. “I went to rehab, and she went down there.”
“Down there” was Division Avenue South, a gritty artery that pulsed through the heart of the city. If prostitution had a business address in the mid-90s, Division was it. Back then, those looking to buy sex cruised by car, not keyboard. On 3 miles of street corners, from Wealthy Street south to 28th Street, sex workers advertised their services.
In the mid-1990s, 17 women, many of them sex workers, went missing or were murdered in Grand Rapids, most vanishing from the red-light district along Division Avenue South. Among all those cases, o…
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