There were seldom days she wasn’t dressed in pink, her favorite color, and there was no way she would go into an alley by herself. But that’s where 9-year-old Mya Lyons was found brutally stabbed one year ago on the South Side.
There were seldom days she wasn’t dressed in pink, her favorite color, and there was no way she would go into an alley by herself. But that’s where 9-year-old Mya Lyons was found brutally stabbed one year ago on the South Side.
Her murder remains a mystery.
Minutes after midnight on July 14, 2008, Mya was found by her father, Richard Lyons, in a poorly lit vacant lot overgrown with weeds at the end of an alley about a half of a block from his home in the 8400 block of South Gilbert Court. The father rushed her, with stab wounds to the abdomen and neck, in his van to Jackson Park Hospital. She died a short time later.
Mya lived with her mother, Ericka Barnes, and younger brother in west suburban Addison and had been visiting her father for the summer.
Barnes and her family have held many prayer vigils near where Mya was found, released pink and white balloons in honor of her only daughter, and have gone door-to-door on South Gilbert Court asking neighbors what they remembered about the hours leading up to when the girl’s body was found.
Most of what Barnes heard was also told to the police. But she lives with the notion that whatever happened to Mya didn’t happen in the alley, Barnes said.
“Something just isn’t right. Somebody knows what happened. I just want justice for my daughter,” the still-grieving mother said.
Within days of Mya’s death, her father, other relatives and a neighbor submitted DNA samples to the police. Nearly one week later, a “person of interest” was questioned but later released and ruled out as a suspect. Two days after her funeral, a cleaning crew found a kitchen-style knife with a six-inch blade that appeared to have blood on it in the lot where her body was discovered.
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