Late on Nov. 9, 2009, and early Nov. 10, 2009, McNeill drank liquor and took cocaine and began texting women he knew. These included Brenda Davis and another woman who lived in the Sleepy Hollow trailer park. The other woman invited him to visit, but when he got there shortly before 3 a.m., she had fallen asleep.
So McNeill went to the trailer where Brenda and Antoinette Davis lived.
Antoinette Davis later told Fayetteville detectives From North Carlorina Police Department that she owed McNeill $200 and he wanted payment in cash or in sex. Davis said she agreed to let McNeill take Shaniya to a motel so he could have sex with the child to settle the debt. Then Davis changed her story, saying McNeill was to take Shaniya so that another man, whose name she did not know, could have sex with the girl.
McNeill took Shaniya to a Comfort Inn & Suites in Sanford.
Around 6 a.m., Antoinette Davis woke her sister Brenda and Brenda’s boyfriend and told them Shaniya was missing. At Brenda’s urging, Antoinette called the police nearly an hour later.
The police came and began an intense search for Shaniya. An Amber Alert was issued to seek the public’s assistance should anyone have seen her.
Meanwhile, McNeill had checked into the Comfort Inn with Shaniya. He left with her around 7:40 a.m.
Hotel employees saw the Amber Alert the next day and recognized Shaniya and called law enforcement. Based on security camera video from the hotel and the fact that McNeill registered under his real name, the police found McNeill and he agreed to speak with them at the Police Department. After McNeill admitted during questioning that he had picked up Shaniya and taken her to the hotel, he was arrested.
This was on Nov. 12. Shaniya had been missing less than 48 hours and authorities thought she could still be alive.
Based on cell phone records of where McNeill’s cell phone had been operating, authorities searched for Shaniya in a rural area near N.C. 87 between Spring Lake and Sanford. But her body was not found until Nov. 16, after McNeill’s lawyers told the police to search an area that deer hunters used to field-dress their kills. It was near outdoor portable toilets.
A search team from the Virgin Islands, which was visiting North Carolina for training, found Shaniya’s body partly under a log in the woods near the intersection of N.C. 87 and Walker Road, near the Carolina Trace Country Club in Lee County.
McNeill was tried in spring 2013 and convicted of first-degree murder.
The jury also found him guilty of sexual offense of a child by an adult offender, taking indecent liberties with a child, first-degree kidnapping, human trafficking, and subjecting the victim to sexual servitude.
The jury sentenced him to death.
For her role in her daughter’s death, Antoinette Davis pleaded guilty in October 2013 to two counts of felonious child abuse and one of second-degree murder. She also pleaded guilty to human trafficking, conspiracy to commit sexual offense of a child by an adult offender, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree sexual offense, sexual servitude, and taking indecent liberties with a minor.
Now 36, Davis is serving a sentence of at least 17 years and six months, but no more than 21 years and nine months. She is projected to get out of prison in 2029.
McNeill, 43, is on death row after his appeal for the reversal of his death sentence was turned down by the Supreme Court and his execution is pending Due to pending litigation surrounding the death penalty in North Carolina, the state has not conducted an execution since August 2006 and it’s unclear when executions will resume. #HistoryLand
