KEMETIC MINDS
Investigative Report — Crimes, Missing Persons & Injustice Against Black America
Key Takeaways
- Stephenson King Jr., 39, is shot and killed by a Boston police officer in March 2026 while experiencing a mental health crisis — officer charged with manslaughter, body cam footage still withheld from the public.
- David Ducado Menton, 42, is shot and killed by a Superior, Wisconsin officer in April 2026 in disputed circumstances; witnesses say he was unarmed and fleeing inside an apartment complex.
- Paige Coffey, a 27-year-old Black woman who vanished in 2019, is found in a garbage bag inside a vacant Cleveland home in April 2026 — seven years after disappearing with minimal national media coverage.
- Amarie Alowonle, 19, shot in the head at a Robbinsdale, Minnesota park in May 2025, remains unsolved — her family brought her case to the state capitol in April 2026 demanding justice.
- Black people make up 38% of missing persons nationally while representing only 14% of the population — and their cases receive a fraction of the media attention given to white missing persons.
Illustrative images via Pexels — free to use
Police Violence: Stephenson King Jr. — Boston, Massachusetts
On the night of March 11, 2026, Stephenson King Jr., a 39-year-old Black man from Dorchester, was shot and killed by Boston Police Officer Nicholas O’Malley in Roxbury during a suspected carjacking call. King’s family says he had been in mental health crisis and had asked his father earlier that evening to call 911 so he could receive medical help — not enforcement. Instead, the encounter ended with three gunshots fired at King as he attempted to drive away. Officer O’Malley has been charged with voluntary manslaughter — a charge so rare in Boston police history that legal observers described it as virtually unprecedented (WGBH, 2026; WBUR, 2026).
Despite the criminal charge, the body camera footage from the incident has not been released. King’s family, represented by prominent civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, held a press conference calling for full transparency and the immediate release of the footage. Boston City Councilor Brian Worrell joined the call, and the full City Council subsequently sent a formal request to the Police Department for body cam footage from all deadly force incidents in 2025 and 2026 (ABC News, 2026). The District Attorney has the final say over release in active death investigations and has refused to make the footage public before trial — leaving King’s family without answers, and the community without accountability (Dorchester Reporter, 2026).
The American Prospect noted that King’s death received remarkably little national attention compared to prior high-profile police killings — no viral video, no large protests, no presidential statement. Civil rights researchers point to a consistent pattern: when body cam footage is withheld, community outrage is harder to sustain, and media interest fades. King’s death and its quiet aftermath illustrate how the mechanics of opacity in police accountability directly suppress the possibility of justice (The American Prospect, 2026).
Police Violence: David Ducado Menton — Superior, Wisconsin
On April 7, 2026, David Ducado Menton, 42, was shot and killed by a Superior, Wisconsin police officer outside an apartment complex at 1705 Oakes Avenue. According to a witness who was with Menton at the time, the two were outside smoking when a police car pulled up. Menton, who had an outstanding warrant, began walking toward the building’s entrance. The officer grabbed him, took him to the ground during a physical altercation, and then shot him. The witness stated that Menton was unarmed at the time of the shooting, though police later released a photo of a firearm they say was recovered at the scene (MPR News, 2026).
Family members and friends held a protest outside the Superior Police Department demanding answers, calling the shooting “execution style” and questioning how the gun, if present, was not visible during the struggle. The Wisconsin Department of Justice has opened an investigation, as required by state law for officer-involved deaths (WPR, 2026). Menton’s death, like King’s, received minimal national coverage — a pattern civil rights organizations have documented for years: Black men killed by police outside major coastal cities rarely generate the sustained attention needed to drive accountability.
The Data Behind the Deaths
Stephenson King and David Menton are individual names attached to a pattern that has persisted for decades and shows no sign of abating. According to Mapping Police Violence, the most comprehensive real-time database of police killings in the United States, more than 200 people were killed by police in the first three months of 2026 alone. Black Americans account for approximately 24–27% of all people killed by police — more than twice their share of the population. In 99% of cases across recent years, the officers involved were not charged with any crime. The Boston case, where Officer O’Malley was charged with manslaughter, is the rare exception that proves the rule.
These are not statistics without faces. Behind each data point is a family that made calls to police hoping for help, or watched a loved one leave home and never return, or received a knock at the door from officers with news they were not equipped to receive. The aggregation of these moments across every city, every year, is what civil rights scholars mean when they use the term systemic racism — not a metaphor, but a measurable, documented, life-and-death reality.
Missing & Murdered Black Women: The Crisis the Media Ignores
While police violence against Black men receives occasional national attention, the parallel crisis of missing and murdered Black women and girls is met, with rare exceptions, by institutional silence. The numbers are staggering: Black people represent 38% of all missing persons in the United States while comprising just 14% of the population. In 2022, over 36% of all missing women and girls — 97,924 people — were Black (Black and Missing Foundation, 2026). Their cases remain open four times longer than those of white missing persons on average, and receive a fraction of the media coverage.
Paige Coffey — Cleveland, Ohio
Paige Natassia Coffey was 27 years old when she disappeared from Bratenahl, Ohio on May 7, 2019. For nearly seven years, her family searched. In April 2026, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner confirmed that skeletal remains found inside a garbage bag at a vacant home on Cleveland’s East Side were hers. She was 35 years old at the time her remains were identified. The FBI opened an investigation and named her former boyfriend — already in federal custody on a firearms charge — as a person of interest (NBC News / Dateline, 2026; Cleveland 19, 2026; WKYC, 2026).
Paige Coffey spent seven years in a garbage bag in a vacant house in one of America’s most distressed cities. Her case received no national media coverage when she disappeared in 2019. It received limited coverage when her remains were found in 2026. Had she been a white woman from a suburban ZIP code, her disappearance almost certainly would have generated an Amber Alert, a CNN segment, and a Facebook page with hundreds of thousands of followers. Instead, her family searched for seven years — alone.
Amarie Alowonle — Robbinsdale, Minnesota
Amarie Cashayla-Marie Alowonle, 19, was at a barbecue with friends at Sanborn Park in Robbinsdale on May 4, 2025, when she was shot in the head. She died at North Memorial Health Hospital eight days later. A year after her death, no arrest has been made. In April 2026, her family — joined by Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and the state’s Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls Office — brought Amarie’s case to the state capitol on Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls Day on the Hill, demanding a $10,000 reward for information and public accountability for the investigation (Spokesman-Recorder, 2026; CBS Minnesota, 2026; KARE11, 2026).
Brittany Binger — Boston, Massachusetts
Brittany Binger, 29, of Mattapan was reported missing in early May 2026 after she was discharged from Boston Medical Center and never returned home. She was last seen near the hospital at approximately 3 a.m. Boston police are actively searching for her. Binger’s case is one of dozens of missing Black women and girls whose cases cycle quietly through local news without breaking into national consciousness (Boston.com, 2026).
Shemika Cosey — Berkeley, California
Shemika Cosey disappeared from her cousin’s home in Berkeley 17 years ago at the age of 16. Her case was never solved. In February 2026, a local station revisited her story — not because of a new lead, but because Shemika’s family is still searching, still hoping, still waiting. Her case represents what the Black and Missing Foundation calls the “forgotten file” phenomenon: missing Black children and teens whose cases go cold not because there were no leads, but because investigators moved on (First Alert 4, 2026).
The URL Media outlet observed on National Missing Persons Day 2026 that bias in missing persons investigations “can mean life or death” — not just figuratively, but literally. When cases are deprioritized based on the race of the missing person, the window for finding survivors closes. The families left behind carry that loss not just as grief, but as a specific and named injustice (URL Media, 2026).
Systemic Injustice: The Economics of Exclusion
The violence against Black bodies — physical and institutional — does not exist in isolation. It is sustained and enabled by a broader architecture of economic exclusion that strips Black Americans of the wealth, stability, and political power needed to demand accountability. A 2026 special report on racial inequities in U.S. housing found that the Black homeownership rate remains at approximately 45% compared to 74% for white Americans — a gap wider today than it was in 1968, the year the Fair Housing Act was passed (Chandan Economics, 2026). Lower homeownership means lower intergenerational wealth, reduced collateral for business loans, and less political weight in local elections — all of which feed back into the conditions that allow police violence to go unpunished and missing persons cases to go unsolved.
Black families in distressed neighborhoods are more likely to have their missing relatives’ cases deprioritized, more likely to live in jurisdictions where police accountability mechanisms are weakest, and more likely to lack the resources — financial, legal, and media — to sustain public pressure for justice. This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of a system built on exclusion and maintained through inertia.
🧠 Kemetic Minds Analysis
What connects Stephenson King Jr., David Menton, Paige Coffey, Amarie Alowonle, Shemika Cosey, and Brittany Binger is not simply that they are Black. What connects them is that the systems designed to protect them — law enforcement, the justice system, the media, and the housing economy — treated their lives as less valuable. Not through any single conspiracy, but through the accumulated weight of a thousand decisions: the officer who reaches for his gun before a social worker, the editor who spikes a missing person story because “our audience doesn’t connect,” the bank that redlines a neighborhood for decades until its infrastructure collapses, the detective who stops returning calls.
The phrase “Missing White Woman Syndrome” was coined by journalist Gwen Ifill in 2004. In 2026, it still applies with the same precision. The day after a white missing person case breaks nationally, there are search parties and hotlines and congressional statements. The day after a Black woman goes missing, her family starts making their own flyers. This is not a media oversight. It is a reflection of who society has decided matters.
If you remember one name from this report, remember Paige Coffey. She was 27 when she disappeared. She was found in a garbage bag seven years later, and the country barely noticed. That silence is not neutral. It is a verdict.
📣 From the Kemetic Minds Newsroom:
If you have any information on the whereabouts or cases of Amarie Alowonle, Shemika Cosey, or Brittany Binger — or any missing Black person in your community — please contact the Black and Missing Foundation at blackandmissinginc.com or tip line 1-800-THE-LOST. You can also submit tips on the Robbinsdale case to (763) 531-1220.
Say her name. Say his name. Say all of their names — until someone answers.
References
- ABC News (2026). Family calls for body camera footage release as Boston police officer faces manslaughter charge. abcnews.com.
- American Prospect (2026). A Black Man’s Death at the Hands of Police Is Going Unacknowledged. prospect.org.
- Black and Missing Foundation (2026). Missing Persons Statistics. blackandmissinginc.com.
- Boston.com (2026). Police searching for Mattapan woman who went missing after leaving hospital. boston.com.
- CBS Minnesota (2026). Family of teen killed in Robbinsdale seeks justice nearly 1 year after her death. cbsnews.com.
- Chandan Economics (2026). Racial Inequities in US Housing: 2026 Special Report. chandan.com.
- Cleveland 19 (2026). Paige Coffey, missing since 2019, found dead in Cleveland. cleveland19.com.
- Dorchester Reporter (2026). Family says Dorchester man fatally shot by police officer was experiencing mental health crisis. dotnews.com.
- First Alert 4 (2026). Missing and overlooked: Black women and girls disappear at disproportionate rates — Shemika Cosey’s family still searching 17 years later. firstalert4.com.
- KARE11 (2026). Family seeks justice in Amarie Alowonle’s shooting death. kare11.com.
- Mapping Police Violence (2026). Mapping Police Violence Database. mappingpoliceviolence.org.
- MPR News (2026). David Menton shot, killed by Superior, Wisconsin, police officer. mprnews.org.
- NBC News / Dateline (2026). Remains identified as missing Cleveland, Ohio, woman Paige Coffey. nbcnews.com.
- Spokesman-Recorder (2026). Missing Murdered Black Women Minnesota 2026 Day on the Hill. spokesman-recorder.com.
- URL Media (2026). National Missing Persons Day: Bias in missing persons cases can mean life or death. url-media.com.
- WBUR (2026). Calls grow for release of body camera footage of fatal Boston police shooting. wbur.org.
- WGBH (2026). Stephenson King Jr.’s family, attorney demand body cam footage of his death. wgbh.org.
- WKYC (2026). Human remains found in Cleveland identified as Paige Coffey. wkyc.com.
- WPR (2026). Family and friends of man shot and killed by Superior officer demand justice. wpr.org.
Investigative Methodology: This intelligence report is compiled using real-time search technology and multi-source verification. All 19 source URLs were verified with HTTP 200 status before publication. No paywalled sources were used.
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