2 weeks ago, she left a doctor's appointment with her baby. They haven't been found since
It's been more than two weeks since Whisper Owen and her daughter, Sandra McCarty, were last seen, according to the Fresno County Sheriff's Office.
Authorities say they have no clues in the Sacramento pair's disappearance, and loved ones have been left wondering and searching.
'It just makes it really hard for me as her mother to shut my brain off and not constantly imagine what could've happened to her,' said Owen's mother, Vickie Torres, tearfully. 'And that beautiful little baby. God, I hope, whatever happened, she's with her mama.'
In a post to social media, the Sheriff's Office said that no information had been found to explain the disappearance. The Fresno Police Department's Missing Persons Unit is leading the investigation and, as of Wednesday evening, had no new developments to report.
'There is nothing in the current missing persons investigations which leads us to believe any foul play is involved with Whisper and her child not being located yet,' the department said in a statement to The Times.
Torres confirmed that Owen and her daughter left Sacramento around 4 a.m. on July 15 and headed south toward Fresno to go to a doctor's appointment for the baby. Owen stopped at Torres' house in Fresno to change Sandra's diaper and then checked in for the appointment at 8:30 a.m., Torres said.
Owen then visited her brother's Fresno home until around 2:45 p.m., then stopped to see Torres at her home again before leaving the city around 5 p.m., Torres said. Owen drove a silver 2006 Chevrolet Trailblazer, and a license plate reader recognized her car in Atwater, about 65 miles from Fresno, at 8 that night, according to officials.
Torres said that Owen probably stopped in Atwater to get baby formula for Sandra or to use the restroom. Security footage from a smoke shop in Atwater captured Owen parking and then changing her baby's diaper around 7:30 p.m., police said.
That was the last sign of Owen, her daughter or her vehicle.
Torres said Owen often spends days at a time at her house in Fresno, so her partner wasn't concerned when she didn't return home that night. Three days later, Owen's partner called Torres, asking where her daughter was.
'I'm like, 'What do you mean? She's not here,'' Torres told The Times. 'So then everything started to get scary at that point.'
Ever since, Torres said, her family has been tirelessly searching the roads from Fresno to Sacramento, reaching out to businesses whose employees may have seen Owen, putting up fliers and spreading the word on social media.
She also said that Owen experienced preeclampsia during her most recent pregnancy, causing her to be hospitalized several times with high blood pressure that continued even after she had given birth. Torres worried that Owen might have had a medical emergency while driving. With no information, it's easy to create troubling scenarios, she said.
Torres said the situation has been distressing for the entire family.
Owen and her partner are parents to Sandra, as well as a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old. She also has a 16-year-old child from a previous relationship.
'All of these kids are losing their minds,' Torres said. 'I mean, she didn't just run off or anything like that. ... She's got other children, I mean, no.'
Owen's partner, whom Torres declined to name and who didn't immediately respond to The Times' request for comment, 'has been constantly searching, and he's exhausting every resource to him,' she said.
Torres said she has been frustrated with the lack of information found so far. She has reached out to other agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Sacramento Police Department, asking for assistance in the investigation.
'They've all blown me off,' Torres said.
Sacramento police said in a statement to The Times, however, that they had assisted Fresno in the investigation. A Department of Justice spokesperson said the agency had posted Owen and her daughter on its public California Missing Persons website. The FBI didn't respond to The Times' request for comment.
Torres described her daughter as an outspoken, trusting person who would drop anything to help a stranger in need.
'A lot of people love her,' Torres said. 'I've never met anybody that didn't like my daughter.'
Fresno police said that teams were checking family shelters in Sacramento County and surrounding areas for Owen and her daughter.
The Fresno Sheriff's Office advised the public to dial 911 if they saw Owen and her daughter or the vehicle.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
12 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Brutal arrest of Black student shows benefits of camera in car in recording police stops
A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles. William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a crucial view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can't clearly be seen in officer body-camera video released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Since McNeil had the foresight to record the encounter from inside the vehicle, 'we got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,' said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers advising McNeil. 'All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement,' Crump said. 'Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on because of bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states. The incident reports don't describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the Sheriff's Office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's spokesperson declined to comment about the case last week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and stitches in his lip. His attorneys accused the Sheriff's Office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated, 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful.' McNeil is hardly the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile's girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis. But McNeil's arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events from what is described in police reports, his lawyers said. Christopher Mercado, who retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil's legal team's suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver's car could offer a crucial point of view. 'Use technology to your advantage,' said Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 'There's nothing nefarious about it. It's actually a smart thing, in my opinion.' Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it's a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn't make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etcetera,' Brunson said. Although the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office declined to speak to the Associated Press last week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He challenged some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him wrote in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police body cams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. After the police murder of Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a college football game last year between Florida and Georgia. The sheriff showed the officers' body-cam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the footage didn't capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the body-cam video didn't clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the last 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. 'People who live in a civil society don't expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial,' Brunson said. 'So it's hard for people who don't have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,' he said. 'And that's where video does play a big part, because people can't deny what they see.' Martin writes for the Associated Press.
Los Angeles Times
19 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
A Compton family endured two killings in just eight months. Why justice is so elusive
Jessica Carter is tired of being resilient. After her brother, Richard Ware, 48, was stabbed to death outside a Los Feliz homeless shelter last month, it fell to her to hold their extended family together. Just eight months prior, another relative — her 36-year-old nephew, Jesse Darjean — was gunned down around the block from his childhood home in Compton. His slaying remains unsolved. Across L.A. County and around the country, murder rates are falling to lows not seen since the late 1960s. Yet clearance rates — a measure of how often police solve cases — have remained relatively steady. In other words: Even with fewer homicides to investigate, authorities have been unable to bring more murderers to justice. Police data show killings of Black and Latino people are still less likely to be solved than those of white or Asian victims. Carter's hometown of Compton is still crawling out from under its reputation as a national epicenter for gang violence. But for all of its continued struggles, violent crime — especially killings — has plummeted. When the gang wars peaked in 1991, there were 87 homicides. Last year, there were 18, including Darjean's fatal shooting on Oct. 24. The way Carter sees it, the killers who took her brother and nephew are both getting away with it — but for different reasons. In Darjean's shooting, there are no known suspects, witnesses or motive. But the man who stabbed Ware is known to authorities. The L.A. County district attorney's office declined to file charges against him, finding evidence of self-defense, according to a memo released to The Times. Ware's sister and other relatives dispute the D.A.'s decision, claiming authorities have failed to fully investigate. 'The system failed him,' Carter said. In the absence of arrests and charges, Carter and her family have simmered with rage, grief and frustration. With digital footprints, DNA testing and more resources than ever available to police, how is it that the people who took their loved ones are still walking free? In Darjean's case, the investigation is led by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, which has patrolled Compton since 2000, when the city disbanded its own Police Department. Leads appear to be scarce. His body was found in the back seat of his car, which had been riddled with bullets. A father of three, he had just gotten home late at night from one of his jobs as a security guard. To Sherrina Lewis, his mother, it seemed the world was quick to forget and move on. News outlets largely ignored the shooting. Social media sensationalized it. She couldn't resist reading some of the comments online, speculating about whether her son was killed by someone he knew or because of his race or a gang affiliation. But, Darjean was no gangster, she says. True, there had been rumors around the neighborhood about escalating conflict between the Cedar Block Pirus, a Black gang, and their Latino rivals. But if anything, Lewis said, her son was targeted in a classic case of wrong place, wrong time. When homicide detectives began knocking on doors for answers, her former neighbors claimed not to have seen anything. For Lewis, it felt like betrayal — many of those neighbors had watched Darjean grow up with their kids. 'Each and every day I have to ask God to lift the hardness in my heart, because I'm angry,' Lewis said. 'They're not gonna make my son no cold case, I promise you that.' Lewis nearly lost Darjean once before, at the moment of his birth. He and his twin brother were born three months early, and doctors warned that Darjean was the less likely of the two to survive. He suffered from respiratory problems, which left him dependent on a breathing machine. The prognosis was bleak. Doctors asked her for 'a name for his death certificate' in case he died en route to a hospital in Long Beach. Picking 'Jesse' on the spot was agony, she said. In the end, Darjean was the twin who survived. Shy as a child, he had grown up to be outgoing and witty, a person who loved to cook soul food and make dance videos with his sister and post them on Instagram. While his siblings all moved away as they got older, Darjean insisted on staying put. Compton was home, through and through, he used to tell his mother. He wasn't blind to the gang violence, but he came to know a different side of the city, one that represented Black joy and resilience — a side he saw captured in Kendrick Lamar's music video for the Grammy-winning 'Not Like Us.' When his niece ran for Miss Teen Compton, Darjean advocated on her behalf by taking out a full-page ad in the local newspaper that proclaimed: 'Compton is the best city on Earth.' But Darjean knew the pain of losing loved ones. His friend Montae Talbert was killed late one night in 2011 in a drive-by shooting outside an Inglewood liquor store. Talbert, known as M-Bone, was a member of the rap group Cali Swag District, the group behind the viral rap dance the 'Dougie.' Around the same time, the mother of Darjean's oldest daughter was gunned down in Compton. A few years later, another uncle, Terry Carter, a businessman who built classic lowrider cars and started a record label with Ice Cube, was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by rap impresario Marion 'Suge' Knight. After Darjean's funeral, which Lewis said drew more than 1,000 people, she returned to the scene of the shooting: Brazil Street, right off Wilmington Avenue, on a modest block of stucco and wood-frame homes. With the bravado of an angry, grieving mother, she began going door-to-door in her old neighborhood, seeking answers. She wanted to show anyone who was watching that she wouldn't be intimidated into silence. When she confronted one of Darjean's close childhood friends about what happened, he swore he didn't know anything. She didn't believe him. 'He just broke down crying. I can tell it was eating him up,' Lewis said. The L.A. County Sheriff's Department did not respond to multiple inquires about Darjean's case. On some level, Lewis understands the hesitancy. Fear of gang retaliation and distrust of law enforcement still hangs over the west Compton neighborhood. After raising her six children there, in 2006 she sold their family home of 50 years and moved to Palmdale because she didn't want her 'kids to become accustomed to death.' For her, she said, the final straw was the discovery of a body 'propped up' on her neighbor's fence. Like generations of Black women before her, Lewis is faced with enormous pressure to carry their family's burden. Possessing a superhuman-like will to overcome adversity is celebrated by society with terms such as 'Black Girl Magic' and 'Strong Black Woman,' said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University. But such unrealistic expectations not only strip Black women of their innocence from an early age, but also contribute to higher pregnancy-related death rates and other bad health outcomes, she said. 'A lot of times people expect Black women to take care of it,' Bentley-Edwards said in an interview. Instead of romanticizing the struggle, she said, there should be 'tangible support like housing or employment' and other resources. But experts say safety nets are at risk, particularly after the Trump administration in April terminated roughly $811 million in public safety grants for L.A. and other major cities. As a result, federal funds for victim services programs, which offer counseling and other resources, have been slashed. Lewis never thought she'd be in a position to need such help. 'The funny thing is, we're from Compton born and raised, but we were not a statistic until my son was murdered,' she said. 'My kids had a two-parent household. We both had jobs. We weren't doing welfare: I worked every day.' Months of waiting on an arrest in Darjean's death led Carter, his aunt, into a 'dark place.' She ended up taking a spiritual retreat into the mountains of Nigeria. She was still working through the feelings of anger and guilt when she learned her brother, Ware, had been fatally stabbed on July 5. She described the days and weeks that followed as a teary blur. Coming from a family of nurses taught her how to push aside her own grief and forge on, but she was left wondering how much more she could endure. Ware, who went by Duke, was his family's unofficial historian, setting out to map out their sprawling Portuguese and Creole roots and scouring the internet for long-lost relatives. He used to brag all the time about his daughter, who had graduated from nursing school and moved back to the L.A. area to work at a pediatric intensive care unit on the Westside. He used to joke that for all of his shortcomings as a father, he had at least gotten one thing right. In recent months, though, Ware's life had started to spiral. His diabetes had gotten worse, and a back injury left him unable to continue in his job as a long-haul truck driver. Relatives worried he was hiding a drug addiction from them. He had adopted a bull mastiff puppy named Nala. She used to follow him everywhere, usually trotting a few steps behind without a leash. Even when he was having trouble making ends meet, he always 'spoiled her,' his family said. For a few months, he lived out of a van one of his sisters bought for him. He then landed at a shelter, a hangar-style structure on the edge of Griffith Park. He and Nala were kicked out after a short time, but he still frequented the area, and it's where L.A. County authorities said the fight that ended in his killing began. Prosecutors said in a memo that surveillance video showed Ware and his dog chasing another man into a parking lot across the street from the shelter. The two men, the D.A.'s memo said, had been involved in an ongoing dispute, possibly over a woman. According to the memo, the man said he'd been carrying a knife because of a previous altercation in which Ware ordered his dog to attack. On the day of the stabbing, the man said, Ware had shown up with Nala at the shelter, looking for a confrontation. After the fight, responding officers found Ware suffering from a deep wound to his chest, Nala with several lacerations and the suspect hiding in a nearby porta-potty. His clothes had been torn off, and he was bleeding profusely from several severe dog bites, the memo said. Prosecutors said witnesses corroborated the man's story that Ware had been the aggressor, in addition to the video footage. Ware's family says that account contradicts what they heard from other residents, who claimed Ware was the one defending himself after the other man attacked him with a vodka bottle. In the meantime, they are working to secure Nala's release from the pound, where she has been nursing her injuries. On July 8, Carter organized a candlelight vigil for her brother outside the shelter where the killing happened. That morning, she said, she cried in the shower before steeling herself so she could run out to a Dollar Tree store to pick up some balloons. When she got to the vigil, Lewis made her way around, greeting the swarm of relatives holding homemade signs and chanting Ware's name. After a final prayer, the group released balloons, most of which floated upward with the evening's lazy breeze. Some, though, got caught in the branches of a large tree nearby. A smile finally crossed Carter's face as she pointed up to them. She took it as a sign from Ware, as though he was saying a last goodbye before he departed to heaven. 'He's trying to hang on,' she said.
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Precinct DTLA, well-known gay bar, warns it could close after former employee claims discrimination
A downtown Los Angeles bar known as a haven for the gay community is warning it could soon shutter as it faces a costly legal fight with a former employee. 'We're a couple of slow weekends away from having to close our doors,' owners of Precinct DTLA wrote Friday on Instagram. 'Like many small businesses, we've taken hit after hit — from COVID shutdowns and ICE raids to citywide curfews and the ongoing decline of nightlife. But what we're facing now is even more devastating.' In May, Jessica Gonzales sued the bar, its owner, manager and an employee, alleging she faced discrimination and harassment as a cisgender, heterosexual woman and was subjected to an unsafe work environment. Gonzales, who worked at the bar on Broadway for eight years, claimed that when she reported employees and patrons were having sex in the bar, its owner told her to 'stop complaining.' According to a complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Gonzales was required to work the coat check for Precinct DTLA's weekly 'jockstrap / underwear party' without receiving pay. She said the bar's manager eliminated the coat check fee, believing it would 'incentivize more patrons to drop their pants.' Gonzales claimed the environment grew so hostile she needed to bring stress balls to work. One day, her complaint said, another employee grabbed her stress ball and refused to give it back to her. In a struggle over the stress ball, Gonzales claims the employee broke two of her fingers. According to her lawsuit, Gonzales was effectively fired after the incident, in part because Precinct DTLA's owner and manager wanted to replace her with a gay male employee. 'These claims are completely false,' the bar's representatives wrote on Instagram. In the post, they added that the lawyer representing Gonzales 'appears to have a clear anti-LGBTQ agenda.' 'There are multiple reports — including from individuals who previously worked with him — that he used anti-LGBTQ slurs in written emails while at his former firm,' they wrote on Instagram. Gonzales is represented by John Barber, court records show. The Times reported in 2023 that Barber and his colleague, Jeff Ranen, regularly denigrated Black, Jewish, Middle Eastern, Asian and gay people in emails they exchanged while partners at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith. After Barber and Ranen left to start their own firm, Lewis Brisbois released scores of the lawyer's emails, which showed the men regularly used anti-gay slurs to refer to people, The Times reported. In a joint statement at the time, Barber and Ranen said they were 'ashamed' and 'deeply sorry.' Barber didn't immediately return a request for comment Saturday. In the Instagram post, Precinct DTLA's representatives said defending themselves from Gonzales' allegations was 'draining us emotionally and financially.' 'Come to the bar,' they wrote. 'Buy a drink. Order some food. Tip the staff. Show up.'
