College student missing a week; 'It looked like she just vanished'


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
July 5, 2005 Tuesday Home Edition
Metro News: Pg. 1B

By Rhonda Cook


Chasity Nicole Lewis seems to have simply vanished.

The 22-year-old Clark Atlanta University psychology student was to have flown home to San Francisco for the summer break, but she never got off the plane as scheduled last Tuesday.

Her mother, Theresa Lewis, said the 6 a.m. daily wake-up calls from her only child stopped a week before that. And she hasn't called her father, who lives in Texas, either.

"This is out of character for her," Theresa Lewis said Monday, just a few hours before she was to return from Atlanta to California, where she is serving as a juror in a murder trial. "It has to be a top priority that she is found. I don't know if she snapped or lost her mind or where she is. Something has happened. It was unlike her not to communicate. We talk every day."

Atlanta police spokesman Sgt. John Quigley said a missing persons report was filed early Saturday, just a few hours after the mother arrived in Atlanta from California. "The . . . thing that got our attention is she purchased a ticket [to fly home]," Quigley said. "That's a reason to be concerned."

Quigley said police were following up and would distribute photographs of the missing woman to media outlets.

Lewis said Chasity had stayed in Atlanta a few weeks after the semester ended this past spring to wrap up some loose ends so that her return for the fall semester would be less complicated. But she often told her mother, "I can't wait until I come home."

But the last time they spoke, June 22, her daughter sounded "down, not her bubbly self," Theresa Lewis said. And follow-up phone calls to check on her were not answered.

So Lewis called a friend who lives in the area to go to her daughter's rented house near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and then to the police, who found the house locked. With the landlord out of town, a cousin, David Whatley, was persuaded to climb through a window into the house last Tuesday.

"All of her things were there," Lewis said. "Her ATM card. Her keys. Her passport. Her cellphone. Her purse."

"It looked like she just vanished," said Whatley, who had had lunch with Chasity the day before. "I looked the whole house over, and nobody was there."

There was an open wine spritzer, and it looked as if she had taken only one sip from the bottle, he said. The bed was unmade, the air conditioner was on and a fan was running. And her Labrador retriever, Simba, was outside the fence.

"The police said it looked like she got distracted and she just got up and walked out," Theresa Lewis said, adding that she called almost everyone whose number was in the directory on her daughter's cellphone and that no one had seen her. "This is not making any sense," Lewis said.