Sage walked toward the 500 block of Main Street. She stopped to talk to a friend and told them she was going to meet a man. She didn’t come home that night, nor the next morning, nor the day after that.
Sage has been missing for more than four years and is now considered murdered, but the Charlottesville Police Department says they’re no closer to knowing what happened to her—or if they have any new information, they’re not sharing it. The prime suspect was the man she was supposed to meet, who skipped town just days after Sage’s disappearance, before police could interview him in person.
After years of trying to locate him, police suddenly cleared him of suspicion in 2015, only to change their minds again. The CPD says it has aggressively pursued the case, which has been difficult, and if people have information they haven’t shared it with police. A new police chief took office last year and he promises the case is getting a fresh look—but if anything new has come to light, Sage’s friends and family certainly don’t know it.
“There’s a bigger issue there,” said Lieutenant James Mooney, the detective who’s stayed with the case the longest, and who blames the lethargic pace of the case on the fact that Sage was black and trans and poor. “Only a very small fraction of our community has taken interest in Sage.”
Sage was memorable, and stories about her abound. Like how she ended up doing a Vogue-style shoot with a UVA student on the Route 7 bus. Like how she once helped carry an old man’s groceries to his car while wearing a miniskirt and three-inch heels. Like how every clubgoer leaned closer when Sage spoke, as if they were campers pulled to a fire, according to Jason Elliott, Mr. Pride of America. But Sage’s family and friends say, unlike those afforded to missing white girls, the investigation into her disappearance was slow, slapdash, and followed a zigzagging logic that makes little sense to anyone. And they’re in search of a better story.
THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA IN CHARLOTTESVILLE WAS built by the enslaved and worships Thomas Jefferson, a pragmatic and brutal slave owner. Charlottesville’s public schools closed for five months in 1958 rather than comply with the federal order to desegregate. In the mid-1960s, a middle-class black neighborhood called Vinegar Hill was razed—under the guise of “urban renewal”—because of its proximity to downtown, which developed into a commercial corridor that would put the city on the map for education, culture, and tourism. What were once black-owned homes are now a major roadway, hotel, and Staples that border a brick-paved pedestrian shopping mall.
These days, Charlottesville can claim the titles of one of the top 10 best American cities for book lovers and the “happiest city in America.” But happy for whom? This past May, a crowd led by noted white nationalist and UVA alum Richard Spencer gathered in Charlottesville’s Lee Park to protest the removal of a statue of the park’s namesake, chanting, “You will not replace us.”
Home values and rents are high, but the number of affordable housing units is low. The median income in Charlottesville is about $50,000 a year, yet nearly a third of its residents do not earn a wage that allows them to pay for food, clothing, housing, and transportation. Just 20 percent of Charlottesville’s population is black, but they make up 80 percent of those stopped and frisked by police. Just 6 percent of UVA students are black, yet people of color make up the vast majority of staff in UVA’s on-campus cafes and cafeterias.
In 2011, the author of a report on poverty put it plainly: “When you look in the middle of the city of Charlottesville, you see a big orange dot, and that’s where all the poor people live.”
Sage grew up in that orange dot, raised from the age of three by her grandmother, Miss Cookie, in her apartment in what was then called Garrett Square, an affordable housing complex. Miss Cookie was a dedicated parent and a prominent community figure, serving on the tenants’ association board and resident patrol.
When Sage was 12, a wrought-iron fence went up that made the complex residents feel like prisoners, so Miss Cookie moved Sage to a house in Charlottesville’s Fifeville neighborhood. That’s when they met Shakira Washington, who lived two doors down, and who would soon call Miss Cookie “grandma,” too.
“[Sage and I] got into an altercation,” Shakira said. “Our families came out of the house and stopped it. We were together every day after that.” Shakira is trans and was already asking her middle school teachers to use female pronouns.
One day, Sage came to Miss Cookie and said there was something she needed to confess—then asked Miss Cookie not to be mad.
“And she said, ‘Grandma, I’m gay.’ And I said, ‘You aren’t telling me anything that I don’t already know.’” They sat there hugging for a long time.
Although she often struggled in school, Sage became the first in her family to graduate high school. She took cosmetology classes, braided out of her home, and swept hair at a salon. Foster care—where she had been since Miss Cookie returned her to her mother, who was subsequently deemed unfit—paid for her to have her own apartment, so she asked Shakira and another childhood friend, named Aubrey Carson, if they would move in and share it with her.
Sometimes they went to parties that catered to men on the down low. They also hosted parties at the apartment on Harris Street and invited men and other friends over. They had a tight friend crew that also included Aubrey and three women named Alexis, Tiffany, and Chelsea. Sometimes they hooked up for fun, other times for money. The guys they met came from all walks of life; many of them were married. If either Sage or Shakira was going to hook up, they would text the other. One time, Shakira recalls, a UVA professor arranged for her to come over to his house in a fancy neighborhood and when the man left the room, she heard a knock on the window. It was Sage, outside in the bushes, watching her to make sure she was okay.
Shakira didn’t hold a high school diploma, and getting a job without one wasn’t easy; potential employers seemed nervous when she mentioned she was trans, then didn’t call. Sage and Aubrey were harassed on the street, called slurs, once chased by a crowd. Sage’s jobs paid minimum wage, and neither Miss Cookie nor Sage’s dad, Dean, had a lot of cash to spare.
Dean had been incarcerated for several years on a drug charge when Sage was young, but now he was eager to play a bigger role in Sage’s life. He struggled to accept Sage, first as a gay man and then as a trans woman, but a Lifetime movie called Prayers for Bobby changed his mind. “Dude was like that and his family dropped him. I just felt I couldn’t do that to my child,” Dean said. “When she walked by on the street and I was at the barbershop with my boys, I would say, ‘Come here, I want you to meet my child.’”
Sage wasn’t a stranger to interpersonal trouble. Her Facebook account shows messages from March 2012 in which a friend is telling her to “watch her back,” that people on the street had it out for her because she’d contacted the wife of a man she’d hooked up with. Occasionally, Sage also placed Casual Encounters ads on Craigslist, a practice Shakira didn’t approve of. This is how police believe Sage met Erik McFadden.
NOVEMBER 19, 2012, WAS A MONDAY, AND SHAKIRA’S 19TH birthday. The friend group celebrated Shakira in style at the apartment. But then a girl came busting through the door wanting to start a fight with one of Sage’s friends over a man. The fight migrated outside. There were cars parked all the way up Sage’s street. Then car doors opened and a crowd of people tumbled out. In the fray, Sage ended up fighting with a man named Jamel Smith, an acquaintance whom Sage had seen around town. Things escalated and someone called the police.