She is wearing a favorite jean jacket, a fashionable kind with a slightly worn look. With her braces and her bouncy hair, it makes her look perhaps a bit younger than a 16-year-old child.
It's late. Already into the next summer day, officially, but still the middle of the night in a Rochester Marketview neighborhood with a bright street light showing her the familiar way. And Jakarah Lopez-Moore is doing something routine — crossing the street with slow, steady steps, turning and clicking her car locked with a key fob.
A door camera catches the motion that late August night. It's the last footage we are aware of that shows Jakarah alive.
Pause the frame.
In this recording, Jakarah is still real, still vibrant. She'd dropped off a friend and was coming home, where she'd look at her phone and speak to her grandmother, according to family.
They had talked earlier in the night about how cringy the first "Twilight" movie was. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Keep the frame paused. In this moment in time, a missing girl is still not lost, not agonized over, not found killed in woods near manufacturing buildings. Jakarah is holding her bag and coming home. Hit play ... she's turning toward the house, then she is clambering up the steps and inside.
When your loved one is missing, like so many missing children out there from Rochester, from western New York state, you send these pictures and video out into the world, digital messages that spread the word: Find. Her.
If you hear the worst, like one Rochester mother and grandmother and siblings heard this past weekend, these frozen-in-time moments become an artifact of the last night you saw her alive.
We don't know what happened to Jakarah. Police are investigating. We don't know who took her away.
But we know something about how she lived her life, and that's a stronger legacy than a still photo on a missing poster or a freeze frame on a Ring video. Jakarah lived a vibrant life and was loved, and she represents a valuable and too vulnerable demographic in Rochester.
Waiting for a missing teen to come home in Rochester NY
Jakarah’s big pink bed sits in the middle of her room next to a tall cage where her ferret lives.
The ferret's name is Malaysia.
Her two favorite sloth stuffed animals are on her pillow on an early October day, untouched since she left. Above her bed hangs a baby pink hammock with the rest of her stuffed animals, including the first teddy bear her grandma gave to her when she was little.
Tracy McDaniels is Jakarah’s grandmother. The girl moved in with her around March 2022.
It was no longer the best plan that she live with her mom, although they by all accounts had a close relationship, and Jakarah didn’t trust the foster care system after her experience with it, family said.
McDaniels and the girl's mother were waiting this autumn day for Jakarah to come home, and they were very worried. Also, an entire region of America was focused on the story of Charlotte Sena, a missing white girl from a campsite who had been riding her bike. That was appropriate publicity, but beyond that frightening incident with another worried family — was enough attention being paid to Jakarah?
It was agony, waiting to find out who had taken her, why and what had happened to their girl.
Who was Jakarah Lopez-Moore?
Jakarah is a normal teenager who likes to listen to music, watch TV, spend time on her phone, her grandmother told us in October. The teen was also learning how to cook.
“She liked to put hot sauce or buffalo sauce on everything," McDaniels said. "Then she'd get mad at me, because I didn't put enough spices in my food.
"She'd just like, dance around all the time and you know — her favorite thing was twerking.”
Jakarah had just turned 16 in early August. She was Black, 5 feet 8 inches and 120 pounds. That is what the missing child poster would say when it went out to the world. Her eyes, brown. Her hair, black. (Her mom said in a social media post that this height and weight was wrong and she was one inch taller and 30 pounds heavier.)
"Her hair is in locs like the third picture (shows)," wrote her mother on Facebook. "It's been 8 days! Bring my baby home!!"
Jakarah had a rose tattoo on the back of her left hand and “BRI” on her outer left forearm.
She was outspoken and did what she wanted to do, said her mother, Christee Lopez, when we spoke with her earlier this month. She and her daughter were both young, growing up together. Lopez had Jakarah when she was 16 years old, the same age as her daughter in the freeze frame on the Ring video.
Jakarah had been talking a lot lately about bettering her life, because she made some mistakes in her past and wanted to improve, Lopez said. She said had been talking about joining the Job Corps and becoming a registered nurse so she could go on to become a nurse practitioner.
Remembering a teen girl killed in Rochester
In Jakarah's bedroom, while showing it to a reporter, McDaniels bent down to tell Malaysia she could come out to play soon, as her little white paws scratched at the cage.
Jakarah loved animals, McDaniels explained as her two cats, Firefox and Cleo, crawled out from under the pink bed. She laughed as she remembered how Jakarah would get jealous when the cats decided to sleep with her on the couch instead of in Jakarah’s room.
“She would get mad and grab a sloth to sleep with,” McDaniels said.
Besides a cat’s cries for attention, the room is still and quiet. Her hairbrushes and lotion sit on her vanity where she last left them. Her uneaten snacks sit in drawers next to her bed.
Like many young teenage girls, Jakarah spent most of her time in her room, listening to music or playing Call of Duty on the big flat screen TV above her vanity.
A bond between a young mother and daughter
“I’m terrible at conveying my emotions, but I feel empty," her mother told us in early October trying to hold back tears. "Like, I had Jakarah when I was literally her age. We literally grew up together, so we have been through everything together, like she is my right hand.
“A lot of people don’t have that relationship with their kids, but I keep everything 100 with Jakarah, and Jakarah keeps everything 100 with me. We talk to each other about everything.”
As the days passed and there was no word about her daughter, Lopez wasn't eating much.
The first 24 hours that Jakarah was gone, they weren't too worried, because they figured she was with either with cousins or her aunt. Once they realized her phone had been turned off and she hadn’t been in touch with anyone, they called the police, her mother said.
“Her whole life is on that phone," she said.
Her daughter was smart and funny and trying to rise above some of her past. She was on probation, and her grandmother said the girl was scared that she would end up in jail.
She was loved.
Expecting Jakarah to come home: A missing teen
“She could inspire people, you know?" her grandmother said. "She does inspire people to do better. She’ll point out your flaws, and she has good insights sometimes, she thinks outside the box.”
If she could be anything, maybe — an Indy driver?
Jakarah had problems and disappointments. She was peeved that the family didn't throw her a Sweet 16 party.
Her grandmother dreamed about Jakarah while they waited for news. In the dream, she had her canes and was walking down a hill, a field with an embankment, and there was a flatbed truck there. It was an odd dream.
When she woke up, she tried hard to remember the details.
“I said, I gotta remember this dream it might be important," she said. "I haven’t forgotten it.”
When Jakarah was a baby, she would cry whenever her grandma had to leave. She had a lot of hair as a baby — and two buck teeth.
Jakarah learned to talk at a young age, could hold conversations and was good at reading. In the beginning, she struggled with writing. She was a friendly kid, the family said, and frank. Sometimes, she would just blurt out a thought.
They worried that something bad had happened to Jakarah. Leaving without telling them wasn't like her. Staying out of communication wasn't like her. Being gone this long wasn't like her.
The dress was a big tip-off that something was terribly wrong.
The morning that she went missing, that she got into a car in the dark, was a Sunday. She had told her little sister that she was going to bring her a new dress for church that day.
And she would never break her word to her siblings if she could help it.
Coverage of Jakarah Lopez-Moore disappearance, death
Oct. 17:Hunt for killer of Rochester teen underway: What we know now about her disappearance and death
Oct. 17:Family heartbroken after missing teen found dead in Rochester. Who was Jakarah Lopez-Moore?
Oct. 17:Counselors to be available this week at Edison Tech after missing teen found dead
Oct. 16:Missing 16-year-old Rochester girl found dead in woods; homicide investigation underway
— Madison Scott is a college journalist who is an intern with the Democrat and Chronicle. She has an interest in how the system helps or doesn't help families with missing loved ones. She can be reached at MDScott@gannett.com.
