YOUNGSTOWN — If investigators can show definitively that the body found in a Wirt Street apartment in 1995 is that of America Williams, it will help Williams’ adult daughter heal and close a painful time in her life.

Monique, whose last name was Williams when she was growing up, contacted the Mahoning County Coroner’s Office several weeks ago after a relative told her about news coverage of efforts to identify a woman found dead 1995 in Youngstown. Monique does not live in the Youngstown area.

She called the coroner’s office because the clothing and other descriptions given of the woman from 1995 matched with what she knew of her mother.

“She always wore Air Nike high-tops tennis shoes. The height, the weight, the pants. Just the description of everything,” Monique said.

Monique last saw her mother in 1993, when Monique was 8 and her mother was 28. America was 30 when the body was found. Youngstown police detectives are hoping someone will come forward with information that can help them say for sure who the woman was.

Detective Dave Sweeney wonders if anyone may have a photo of Williams from the 1990s or earlier showing the clothing she wore.

LAST MEMORY

Monique and her brother had been taken away from their mother, who was a drug addict and also was abusive toward Monique. They were living in the Silver Meadows apartments in Kent at the time.

“The last memory I have, when they broke into the apartment and took us away, was watching her being carried out in handcuffs and me screaming in the back of a car — ‘No, no, no. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.’ And that was it until we went to a foster home and started visitation.”

Monique said she remembers being sexually abused by men who came to their home with her mother and remembers her mother having physical fights with a woman who lived nearby. She thinks she blocked out some of her memories from that time as well.

Monique and her brother had three or four visitations with their mother around 1990 before their mother “stopped showing up,” Monique said. She was 11 at the time the body on Wirt Street was found. By the summer of 1993, she and her brother had been adopted.

TOUGHEST MOMENTS

Perhaps the toughest moments in Monique’s life was being told at age 8 that she would not be allowed to see her mother again until Monique was 18.

“This has been hard for me my whole life, being told I could never see my mother again until I was 18 at 8 years old. Do you know what that does to a child? It traumatized me.

“And finding all of this out now? I believe it’s God’s way of telling me it’s OK for me to find out what happened to her. I just want to know what happened to her so I can lay her to rest and have some peace in my life after 30 years.”

She said her mother made mistakes and wrong choices.

“I just think she got caught up with the wrong crowd,” she said. “Just because she made bad decisions doesn’t mean she was a bad person. And I just want to put her in her final resting spot and close that chapter of my life. She doesn’t deserve to be sitting in a box on a shelf in the evidence room at the police department.”

The police department has teeth and a jaw bone from the body found on Wirt Street, Monique said.

She believes her mother was shot to death and thinks a woman who lived with her mother in another town at the time knows something about it.

She said not knowing what happened to her mother has left a hole in her life.

“I’ve always wondered if she is still alive today. All of this time, I’ve gotten bits and pieces, but never really any full answers about what happened to her at all. And I believe the last person she resided with knows more than what she portrays.”

Monique said she and her brother are the “spitting image” of their mother except that Monique’s hair is darker than her mother’s.

She hasn’t blocked out all memories of her mother, remembering “Easters, birthdays, holidays. She always bought me gifts and stuff. A lot of it was a a big blur, but I remember living in the apartment in Kent with her in Silver Meadows.

“My mom taught me how to tie my shoes and how to ride a bike. She let me play outside, in the house,” she said.

“The family I have now; they are wonderful people,” she said. “I have struggled in my life growing up because of all of this. And I think getting closure about her whereabouts or her passing would help me to be able to move on in my life and be more successful than I am now with my own self and my own child. And I don’t want my child to have what was done to me with what happened with America.”

erunyan@tribtoday.com