Aesha Amera Muhammed was 23 and living with her two-year-old son, Amaru, in a boarding house on North 56th Street in Philadelphia when she was last seen on November 30, 2000. She worked at a beauty salon while studying at Venus Beauty Academy and was described by family as a caring mother who would not willingly abandon her child. Tension with the boarding house operator, her father’s half-brother Charles Dockins, was reported; on the day she disappeared she called him to be picked up, saying he was acting crazy and had thrown her dinner away.

Her room was found emptied except for a bed with a bottom sheet and a dresser. Several weeks later Amaru was left alone on the doorstep of Liberty Temple Church in Newark, New Jersey, neatly dressed and unharmed. When reunited with family he said he had witnessed his mother’s murder, saying mommy was bleeding and was hit with a rock, and he named a person to relatives (that name has not been released). The case is being treated as a homicide. Dockins gave investigators differing accounts, was to take a polygraph in January 2001 but disappeared before it, and was later located and returned to prison on an outstanding warrant. No arrests have been announced and Aesha has never been found.

Does anyone have information about Aesha, Amaru’s whereabouts after November 30, 2000, or about the people who lived at that boarding house?