Missing for five years, family of Ebonee Spears still looking for answers

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — On January 15, 2016 Ebonee Spears went missing near her home on Bess Street in Wilmington.

Half a decade later, her family and friends are still searching for answers.

“If you know something, you’ve heard something, come forward and say it, tell it,” Ebonee’s mother Harriet Rivers said. “Quit being a cowardly lion. Come forward and say what you know.”

Rivers says she simply wants this long ordeal to come to an end.

“You only see stuff like that on TV, and there’s an answer at the end,” Rivers said. “Once the show is over, ‘that’s what happened to her within them fifteen minutes’. Fifteen minutes of her life, fifteen minutes. And its taken five years out of her life, fifteen minutes.”

Although a lot of time has passed since Ebonee’s disappearance, Rivers says their family still feels the pain of losing Ebonee like it was just yesterday.

“It’s been five years, but we’re here today — me, her sisters and her family — it’s just no more than five days ago,” Rivers added. “We’re doing five years, but it’s just like five days ago when it first happened. We still feel the same.”

Rivers acknowledges there are many important issues on the minds of people around the Cape Fear. But she feels that people like her missing daughter Ebonee need to be thought of just as often.

“We talk amongst each other about ‘black lives matter’, missing persons lives matter,” Rivers stated. “We need to focus on that as well. We’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands of people missing. We want that to matter too.”

Spears’ case has also been featured on WWAY’s #UNSOLVED series several times.