(somber music) - Everyone thinks that's so bizarre.

How could she be on the bridge and no one would see her on New Year's Eve?

(somber music) - But this issue is a problem in the city of Pittsburgh right now.

Why is it that young, black, female-identifying people are so vulnerable?

- It's up to us to find those people who are missing and to be advocates for them.

We shouldn't just decide what's easiest so our lives can be easier.

We should live in that discomfort and do our part to find those victims.

To find those people who are missing.

(somber music) (gentle music) I am Sydnee Turner, and we're on 2nd Avenue in Hazelwood.

So we're in front of Tonee's mural.

Tonee's my little sister.

She's younger than me by just a year.

(upbeat hip-hop music) They made this so that we would never forget Tonee.

That we would always have a place to visit her and a place to also grieve the loss of her.

(upbeat hip-hop music) Tonee is great.

She was so fun.

She was someone that everyone wanted to be around, so you would have to like, sort of vie for her attentions.

(upbeat hip-hop music) She was like, at 20 years old, already very skilled in the mediums of paint, skateboard design.

She would make skateboards.

And then around the time she went missing, her passions were jewelry making and ceramic arts.

- Tonee came into my life a little over four years ago.

We have a community-based organization that's called Children's Windows To Africa, and Tonee's specific offering to the program was ceramics.

She was our clay teacher.

(upbeat hip-hop music) - The day Tonee went missing was actually December 30th, 2019, but we didn't discover that until December 31st, 2019.

(ominous music) Tonee worked in Braddock, but she lived in Hazelwood.

So she would take a bus to Squirrel Hill, and then she would take a bus from Squirrel Hill to Hazelwood.

We are on the phone talking about her being at Dobra Tea and just hanging out and writing in her journal.

So I was talking to her the day she went missing.

- And then there's conversation about the last person that saw her, which was the bus driver that dropped her off, in her community which led us to know that she made it back home.

- And so no one knows what happened to her after she got off of that bus.

No one knows if she walked home.

No one knows if she walked to the bridge.

No one knows.

It is still a mystery almost three years after she went missing.

(somber music) Her possessions that were found on the bridge were her purse, a pair of shoes.

- [Iasia] A vessel that she made.

And as the story goes, someone that was cycling on a bike came across the bridge, discovered the items.

- Tonee would lose her stuff pretty frequently, like her purse, her keys.

I was like, "You know, I have a car.

I have free time.

I'll give this to Tonee tomorrow."

It wasn't a big deal, until I went to her house December 31st, and I looked everywhere, and she wasn't there.

I also learned that she didn't go to work that day.

No one had seen her in Braddock.

And so when I realized Tonee wasn't there, I just, I had this sinking feeling, and I realized that something was very, very wrong.

- She has her family, but she also has her community family as well.

And all of us stopped what we were doing and started searching immediately.

- And then one or two days later, her wallet was found placed outside of the bridge.

Her wallet was under a poster of her being missing, so that felt very intentionally placed there.

(somber music) - We still have questions about who that individual was that dropped it off.

It was cryptic, but there's some sort of a message there that we still try to understand to this day.

(somber music) Immediately after we found out that Tonee was missing, we mobilized as the older women in her life at the community level.

We showed up to the police station, but they would not let us in.

We had to let Tonee's family, and Sydnee in particular, manage that part, because our representation as community members wasn't the same as being a blood family relative.

And so at that point, we elected to go to the Black & Missing Foundation, and we alerted them that we had a missing person and were advocating from on the ground.

A woman by the name of Derrica and a woman by the name of Natalie gave us our immediate instructions, and they were instrumental in how we approached our on-the-ground searches for her.

(somber music) There were three potential sightings of Tonee while we searched for her.

And then I got two additional phone calls of people just saying, "Please go to the Owl Hollow community."

I believe that's what they call that area.

Ask them.

They know something.

And then they hung up the phone.

(somber music) We want nothing more than to find her.

We want nothing more than an anonymous piece of information that you give us so that we can do what we need to do to bring her home.

- People are looking all over because we have no idea where she could possibly be.

That's the worst part.

There's no like, follow your steps.

It's like, we did that.

We did that for at least a year and a half.

- We can't go on on any other assumptions until there's evidence that suggests that we should stop searching.

We don't have that.

We're in between a world of searching and grieving.

(somber music) Tonee is one person who we are close to, but this issue is a problem in the city of Pittsburgh right now, and it has been.

It's a problem all around the world.

The question about why is it that young, black, female-identifying people are so vulnerable?

The first part is coming from the assumption that when a girl or a young woman goes missing, it's because she decided to, or that it's possible that she is running away or unable to cope with some sort of a situation.

So it's a pathology and a pervasive narrative that assumes that when that happens, it's because they wanted it to.

(somber music) There's also a historic pathology that sexualizes and adultifies young black girls.

It could be because of the way that their physical presentation is.

It could be the assumption that a child that's 12 could be perceived as somebody that's 18 or 19 years old.

And then, unfortunately, with adultification and the assumption that a young girl looks older than what she is, they become a target for trafficking and sexual exploit exploitation.

(somber music) Because of historic racism and discrimination, and all the things that make it hard to thrive and survive and be black and female in the world, create other uphill battles that lent people to assume that this life just isn't important.

And when we look at the binary of comparison, comparing black to white, what gets privilege is the missing white female more so than the missing black female.

(somber music) - It's up to us to find those people who are missing and to be advocates for them.

It's not up to us to decide their fate.

(somber music) There's been a lot of people who kind of like, will even petition me in saying like, "Your sister jumped off the bridge.

Don't you know she killed herself?"

And that's a very obtuse and cruel way to go about things.

Life is very hard.

Everyone's experiencing some form of trauma they're trying to unlearn, and you can't just write people's whole lives and futures off just because you think they committed suicide.

(somber music) Saying it, being honest.

Like, Tonee's missing.

We love her.

Let's not pretend it didn't happen.

Let's not pretend that Tonee never existed.

(somber music) - No matter what people assign as a narrative to a missing person, for their dignity, though, for their dignity alone, the fact that they are not with us as people that love them is indication enough that we, at the minimum, keep looking.

- [Interviewer] What would you say to her if you could talk to her today?

- Oh my gosh, so many things.

Ah, it's hard to even put it into words.

So many things.

All the things I would say would just make me cry.

Yeah.

It's been so long, but it's still so emotional.

(somber music)