I Caused This: The Disappearance of Asha Degree

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

August 14, 2025

Asha Jaquilla Degree was nine years old, living with her parents Harold and Iquilla Degree and her older brother O'Bryant in a residential subdivision north of Shelby, North Carolina. The Degrees were, by every account gathered afterward, an unremarkable, stable, protective family, centered around church, school, and extended relatives, with no computer in the home and no history of the kind of dysfunction that typically accompanies a child's decision to run away. Harold worked at Pittsburgh Plate Glass. Iquilla worked at Kawai America Manufacturing. On the evening of February 13, 2000, the family returned home from church, and both children went to bed around eight o'clock.

A Night Planned in Advance

What happened after that has been reconstructed with unusual precision, largely because of how carefully Asha herself appears to have prepared for it. Around 12:30 in the morning, after a neighborhood power outage was resolved, Harold checked on both sleeping children. He checked again around 2:30 a.m., and both were still asleep. Shortly after that final check, Asha's brother O'Bryant heard her bed squeak. She got up, retrieved a bookbag she had apparently packed and hidden in advance over the preceding days, and left the house entirely on her own, walking out into a night marked by heavy rain and wind.

Between roughly 3:45 and 4:15 that morning, multiple motorists driving along Highway 18 reported seeing a small child walking alone along the roadside in the storm, wearing a white long sleeved shirt and white pants. One driver told investigators he found it strange enough that such a small child would be out alone at that hour that he turned his vehicle around to look more closely, circling the area three separate times. At some point during that encounter, roughly 1.3 miles from her own home, Asha ran off the road and disappeared into the woods. Nobody has confirmed seeing her again since. Iquilla discovered her daughter missing at 5:45 that morning while getting the children ready for school.

A Profile That Never Fit

Investigators who examined the case in its early stages struggled to reconcile what Asha had done with any typical explanation for a child running away from home. She was nine, considerably younger than the profile of a typical runaway, who tends to be at least twelve. She came from a stable household with no documented conflict or grievance serious enough to explain a planned overnight departure into a winter storm. The only disappointment anyone could point to from the days before she vanished was that her basketball team had lost a game, and that she had personally fouled out of it, a detail she reportedly recovered from emotionally well before the night she disappeared. Whatever motivated Asha to leave home that specific night, planned and prepared for over multiple preceding days, has never been satisfactorily explained by anyone, including investigators who eventually concluded the explanation likely had nothing to do with running away at all.

A Bookbag Wrapped in Trash Bags

The case's central piece of physical evidence did not surface until August 2001, eighteen months after Asha disappeared. Construction workers near Morganton, in Burke County, roughly thirty miles north of Shelby, found her bookbag buried at the site, wrapped inside two black trash bags. Inside was a copy of Dr. Seuss's McElligot's Pool, borrowed from the library at Fallston Elementary School, along with a New Kids on the Block concert t-shirt, neither item appearing to have actually belonged to Asha before ending up in the bag with her. The FBI transported the bookbag to its forensic laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, for detailed analysis, an investment of resources that reflected how seriously the bureau had come to treat the case even as the trail on the ground had gone cold.

Twenty Five Years, Then a Name

For most of the following two decades, Asha's case remained officially open but publicly stalled, one of North Carolina's most enduring unsolved child disappearances, revisited periodically in local and national media without producing a break. That changed dramatically beginning in September 2024, when the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office and the FBI executed a search warrant based on new physical evidence, seizing a green 1964 AMC Rambler along with other items of interest, though no human remains were recovered during that search.

The investigation's focus had by then settled on a specific extended family from Cleveland County, the Dedmons. DNA testing on a hair recovered from clothing found inside Asha's backpack was matched to AnnaLee Dedmon Ramirez, who was thirteen years old in 2000. Investigators also developed interest in Ramirez's parents, Roy and Connie Dedmon, along with two of her sisters, Lizzie Foster, who went by Lizzie Dedmon at the time and was sixteen in 2000, and Sarah Caple, fifteen at the time, both having since married and changed their surnames.

In February 2025, investigators executed three additional search warrants, seizing cell phones belonging to a local man and two of his children. Text messages recovered from those phones, obtained through an earlier October 2024 warrant, produced the case's most striking new evidence. According to investigators, Lizzie Foster told her ex-husband at one point that she felt responsible for what happened, telling him plainly that she caused this. In a separate exchange with her sister Sarah Caple, Foster reportedly laid out what she described as the working theory more explicitly still, writing that the theory was that she did it, that it had been an accident, and that it had been covered up afterward. When questioned formally by investigators in February 2025, Foster was found deceptive during a polygraph examination specifically regarding information she appeared to be withholding.

A further search was conducted in April 2025 at a property that had previously belonged to a figure investigators considered significant to the case. The green 1964 AMC Rambler seized during the September 2024 search reportedly shared very similar features to a vehicle the FBI had been seeking in connection with the disappearance for years.

A Case Formally Reclassified

In February 2025, twenty five years after Asha vanished, investigators publicly stated for the first time that they believed she had been the victim of a homicide, and that her body had been deliberately concealed somewhere in the years since. The Dedmon family's attorney has responded by stating that the family denies any involvement in or knowledge of what happened to Asha Degree, and no one has been formally charged in connection with her death as of the most recent public reporting on the case.

The financial incentive to finally produce a conviction has grown substantially alongside the renewed investigative activity. The Cleveland County Sheriff's Office has offered a reward of seventy five thousand dollars for information leading to a resolution, while North Carolina's governor added an additional twenty five thousand dollar reward in June 2025, on top of an earlier FBI reward that had stood at twenty five thousand dollars alongside a separate twenty thousand dollar community fund. Investigators have said they have conducted approximately three hundred interviews connected to the case since renewing their focus on it in 2017, a scale of effort that reflects just how seriously the case has continued to be treated even across a quarter century without an arrest.

Thirty Five Years Old, Still Missing

Asha Degree would have turned thirty five years old on August 5, 2025, an age that exists only in age progressed imagery and in the imagination of a family that has now spent more than half of her potential lifetime without her. Her parents, Harold and Iquilla, have remained active participants in the search for their daughter across every one of the twenty five years since she vanished into a rainstorm a mile from their front door, through false leads, a recovered bookbag that offered evidence without answers, and now, finally, a named family investigators believe holds the truth of what happened, even without the confession, the recovered remains, or the criminal charges that would formally close the case.

Still Unresolved

More than two decades after Asha Jaquilla Degree walked out of her own bedroom in the middle of a February storm, no arrest has been made, and her body has never been found. What has changed, in the final years of this long investigation, is the emergence of a specific family's name, a matched strand of hair, a seized vehicle, and a text message in which one woman reportedly told her own sister, in three words, that she believed she was the one responsible. Whether that admission, if it holds up, will ever translate into a courtroom, a conviction, or the recovery of Asha's remains remains, even now, still an open question.

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