On the evening of March 11, 2014, Danielle Locklear, a 15-year-old high school freshman from Hope Mills, North Carolina, told her grandfather that she was going to visit a friend who lived nearby.
However she went to a creek to hangout with her boyfriend.
When Danielle didn’t return home, her worried grandfather reported her missing two days later, on March 13.
The disappearance of Danielle led to a comprehensive search involving local, state, and federal authorities.
The search efforts were bolstered by volunteers, including Danielle’s boyfriend, Je’Michael Malloy, a senior at a high school in nearby Fayetteville.
The community rallied together, but the search for Danielle took a tragic turn less than a month later.
On April 2, 2014, the case reached a chilling resolution when her boyfriend Malloy, then 17, confessed to killing Danielle.
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| Je’Michael Malloy, |
Malloy, who had been dating Danielle since June 2013, told authorities that he had choked her during an argument at a local creek hangout on the night she disappeared.
To prevent her from screaming, he stuffed a sock in her mouth.
He and his friend, 18-year-old Dominic Tayvon Lock, then disposed of her body in the South River in Cumberland County, using blocks to weigh it down.
Her body was discovered at the bottom of the river on April 2, 2014 after an extensive search.
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| Dominic Tayvon Lock |
The confession devastated Danielle's family.
Her aunt, Chena Simmons, expressed the family's anguish saying, “It’s been a month-long nightmare, and I feel like they’ve been around us. They’ve been in our home. He’s walked with us on searches. We’re disgusted. And to find out that the perpetrator or the person who took her life allegedly is her own boyfriend is a lot to take. It’s a lot. We can’t deal with it.”
Hope Mills Police Chief Joel Acciardo reflected on the tragedy, stating, “All I can say is that this is a tragic event, for the family of the victim, for the families of the suspect. Everybody involved was young. Everybody involved had their whole lives ahead of them.”
In 2016, Malloy pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 25 to 31 years in prison.
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| Je’Michael Malloy and Danielle Locklear |
At the sentencing, Danielle’s mother, Rowna Fowler, conveyed her heartache, saying to Malloy, “You ripped out my soul. I can’t watch my baby get her high school diploma. I can’t watch her get married. That was my only one; I can’t have any more children, Je’Michael. You took that away from me.”
Dominic Lock, who had helped drive the couple to the creek and helped in disposing of the body, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to first-degree murder in 2015.
During Lock’s sentencing in 2016, Fowler also spoke, sharing the painful experience of seeing her daughter’s body at the funeral home, “I went to a funeral home and they pulled my child out of the freezer, and I had to look at her in a plastic bag because they wouldn’t even open it.”
Dominic Lock was released from prison nearly eight and a half years later.
Meanwhile, Malloy, now 28 years old, is projected to be released in 2040.
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