Ever heard of Romona Moore? I hadn't either. She was a 21-year-old Hunter College student who lived in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn with her parents, who are immigrants from Guyana. When she left the house to go to Burger King one night five years ago and didn't return by the next morning, her mother, Elle Carmichael, called the police. The police told her she shouldn't even be calling for a 21-year-old missing woman. They didn't help and closed the complaint that an officer had drafted out of pity. In the four days that followed, as the police refused to help Carmichael by opening an investigation, Romona Moore was being raped and tortured by two men in a house a few blocks from her home. They beat her death on the day that police reluctantly launched an investigation. Carmichael had to help the police find her daughter's body by conducting her own amateur investigation.

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