Little Shaniya Davis’ body was found near Highway 87 in Sanford, N.C., after two days of searching for the missing 5-year-old. Police arrested the child’s mother, Antoinette Davis, and charged her with human trafficking, prostitution and felony child abuse. The warrants allege that Davis intended to sell her daughter into sexual servitude.
Shaniya was last seen at a Comfort Suites hotel in Sanford last week. That same morning, Antoinette Davis reported that the child was missing from her home in Fayetteville. A surveillance video from the Comfort Suites showed that Shaniya was with a man, now identified as 29-year-old Mario McNeill. Police arrested McNeill a few days before the body was found. McNeill surrended to authorities and the police say that he confessed to abducting Shaniya Davis, but his attorney claims that McNeill will plead not guilty.
The public information officer of the Fayetteville Police Department, Theresa Chance, confirmed to reporters that the body had been found. Roughly 200 people had been searching for Shaniya after a tip indicated that she was dead and that her body had possibly been dumped in the search area. Another man, Clarence Coe, had been arrested a few days before McNeill, but charges against him were dropped. There are still many unanswered questions in this tragic and horrific story, not the least of which is what set of circumstances could push a mother to sell her preschool-aged daughter into prostitution?
Mark Logan, a former U.S. ambassador to combat human trafficking, told ABCNews.com that, in instances of parents trafficking their own children, there is typically an abusive and violent father and a desperate mother, but that the cases of parents pimping or selling their own children are “extreme.”
“No amount of poverty or economic desperation can alone explain the prostitution of a child,” Logan says.
There are estimated to be 100,000 minors in the United States that are trafficked each year, but most of them are runaways and the instances of parents being involved are extremely rare. That statistic only adds to the tragedy of the Shaniya Davis case — when children under 11 are trafficked, usually the parents are involved, and so too, are drugs. Antoinette Davis also had a 7-year old boy in her custody. He was placed in foster care this week. –todd williams
