The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children released an age-progressed photo of Alexis Patterson, a Wisconsin girl who has not been seen since 2002.
Alexis, then 7, was last seen May 3, 2002, while walking to Milwaukee’s Hi-Mount Community School with her stepfather, LaRon Bourgeois. Her home in the Washington Heights neighborhood was around half a mile from the school.
FOX 6 reports that Bourgeois told police he watched her cross the street, but the school stated she never made it to class.
A fifth-grade school crossing guard could not confirm if Bourgeois walked Alexis to the school corner that morning, but did confirm that he saw Bourgeois returned the next morning, crying.
“Kinda strange, it’s like she disappeared off the face of the Earth,” Bourgeois said at the time, according to WISN. “Maybe she walked off and somebody may have picked her up.”
Alexis, who often walked home from school alone, had been reported late by school officials 20 times while she was in the first grade.
Despite exhaustive searches conducted by law enforcement in volunteers, Alexis has not been found and no arrests have been made.
According to an “Unsolved” episode and the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal, Bourgeois sold drugs and had been involved robbing and being robbed by drug dealers. In one instance, someone held Alexis and her mother, Ayanna Patterson, at gunpoint.
Someone who provided Bourgeois with drugs to sell had been seen at the family’s home on the morning Alexis disappeared.
Bourgeois later reportedly failed a polygraph test, but has not been criminally charged in the disappearance. However, the FBI reportedly stated that Bourgeois and Ayanna Patterson may have been involved in the disappearance.
FBI analysts do not believe she was abducted by a stranger, but surmised that she also may have been taken by a family member or a neighbor.
In 2022, Ayanna Patterson and Alexis’s birth father, Kenya Campbell, provided DNA samples to authorities.
Alexis was last seen in a purple shirt, red hooded jacket with gray stripes, a jeans and white Nike shoes. She has a scar under her right eye and a bump on her left pinky finger.
She would be 31 this year.
“I’m not giving up, ever,” Ayanna Patterson said in 2002. “Just, I’m not giving up.”
Anyone with information on her whereabouts is urged to contact NCMEC’s 24-hour call center at 1-800-843-5678, or the Milwaukee Police Department at 414-933-4444.
[Feature Photo: Alexis Patterson/NCMEC]
