The last time anyone saw Asha Degree, the 9-year-old was walking along Highway 18 in Shelby, North Carolina, in the early morning hours of February 14, 2000.

This February 8 — nearly 25 years later — a group of 50 supporters and loved ones, including Asha’s parents, and , and brother, , retraced Asha’s steps during a prayer walk they host each year to draw attention to the mysterious case.

Now, however, there’s a fresh spark of hope amid their search for answers. “At least this year,” Asha’s mom told the crowd on February 8, “we know a little bit more than we knew 24 years ago.” A significant break came last September.

The Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI executed eight search warrants with fresh information: Investigators now believe Asha is not alive but was “the victim of a homicide with her body concealed.” They also named multiple suspects, whose properties were among those searched and outlined the DNA evidence connecting them to the case, which remains “very fluid” and “very active,” Sheriff told the Charlotte Observer. “We’re going to bring closure.” Following a power outage, Asha’s dad checked on her and her then-10-year-old brother in their shared room shortly after midnight on Valentine’s Day. Both were sleeping. But sometime before 6:30 a.m., Asha awoke and inexplicably left the house with her backpack.

Two motorists later reported seeing a girl matching her description walking along the highway in stormy weather around 4 a.m.; when one turned around to check on her, the girl ran into the nearby woods. Then-Sheriff called the case “bizarre,” as by all accounts, the fourth grader was “a happy girl” who had “no problems at home or at school.”

Five months ago, authorities released a significant discovery: Search warrant affidavits show DNA on items in Asha’s bag matched to , who was 13 in 2000, and a man named Russell Bradley Underhill, who died in 2004.

Investigators further believe “adult assistance” from Annalee’s parents, locals and Connie Dedmon, who owned local assisted living facilities where Russell lived in the early 2000s, “would have been necessary in the execution and/or concealment of the crime.” In September 2024 searches, police took items including computers, cellphones, flash and hard drives, a tooth in a plastic bag and a green 1960s-era AMC Rambler car. (No arrests have been made; Roy’s attorney says his client denies any involvement in or knowledge of Asha’s disappearance.)

Asha’s family remains desperate for answers. “I hope and pray to God that they find her. Dead or alive,” her great uncle Jesse Jackson told news channel WBTV. “Then we can be at rest.”