The family of 34-year-old ShaLisa Pratt is asking for the public’s help locating the missing Black woman. Pratt boarded a Greyhound bus in Los Angeles to visit family in Atlanta in August but hasn’t been seen since.
According to Yahoo! News, on Aug. 22, ShaLisa’s husband Keith called her mother Felisha Bridget-Smith to say ShaLisa was suffering from a “mental health crisis” and left him. Bridget-Smith thinks the entire situation is strange. “It’s very odd for my daughter not to call any of us when she was already calling us telling us everything that was going on with her,” she told the outlet.
Keith shared that around the time of his wife’s mental health breakdown, she left him and went to a bus station in downtown Los Angeles. He says he was able to locate her from her cell phone and found her at the Greyhound terminal. After trying to reason with her, his efforts were unsuccessful. He assumed she was heading to Atlanta to be with her family. However, he later pinged her phone in San Bernardino, California near another Greyhound bus station.
“I would have never imagined this in my whole entire life. Me and her used to look at missing photos on walls. And like that’s crazy how a person can go missing, you know what I mean? Like she’s a missing person, and I’ve been trying to do everything that I can,” he said.
“The worst part for me is I feel like I had a chance to stop her when I bumped into her at the Greyhound station in L.A., but I just never knew she wasn’t going to go from point A to point B,” he added. ShaLisa’s sister Ebonee Best is an active duty service member who is stationed in Germany. She says this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. “The biggest red flag for us is this thing happened before, I think a month ago [in July], and she got a Greyhound ticket and she called us with the information,” she shared.
Because of ShaLisa’s history, the LAPD Missing Persons Unit and the San Bernardino Police Department have considered her a “voluntary missing person.” The LAPD has since dropped her missing persons case.