A WOMAN who vanished days after accepting a new job offer online reportedly made a cryptic call asking to be rescued a month after her mysterious disappearance.
TiJae Baker, 23, disappeared last month after traveling from New York to Washington DC to create artwork for a woman she met online, her family says.
Mom Toquanna Baker told ABC 7 News that the budding artist left for DC on a bus on May 1.
Yet the family received only silence from the young woman after she arrived in the capital until a chilling phone call a few days ago, she claims.
Tijae reportedly called from a Maryland nail salon on June 1 and silently plead for someone to rescue her.
“She said just tell her mother to come get her — now,” Roxanne Baker, TiJae’s grandmother, told ABC 7 New York.
However, when the family went to Maryland, TiJae was no longer there, they said.
Toquanna shared surveillance footage from the salon reportedly showing her daughter pacing around and on the phone.
The mom also claimed she tracked down the woman who offered her daughter the job and worries that her daughter unwillingly joined a cult.
“For somebody to lure my daughter into another state. I have to deal with this, and this is going to affect my daughter’s life forever,” Toquanna told CBS News.
The mother said that her daughter usually speaks with her every day but after she went to DC, the steady communication between the pair stopped.
TiJae’s phone also stopped ringing.
Toquanna has since filed a police report for her missing daughter.
The young woman has been described as a 5’7″, 130 pounds, Black woman with black hair and brown eyes.
The family has been also putting up posters in the Washington DC area and beyond, calling for her daughter’s safe return.
Local council members who have advocated for changes to how missing people cases are handled have been informed about TiJae’s story.
“On the missing person bill, they don’t register Black people as quickly as they do white people, so when a white person’s missing, the whole world stops,” Councilmember Darlene Mealy told CBS News.
“When Black people are missing, It’s ‘oh, she’ll be calling back or she might be a partying,”
This criticism compared the coverage to Gabby Petito, a white woman who went missing and was later found murdered by her boyfriend last year.
“We are asking for justice to make sure Ms. Baker comes home,” councilmember Darlene Mealy also told ABC 7.
