Ashanti Billie was 19 years old, working at a Blimpie sandwich shop on a Virginia Navy base, when she vanished before dawn on September 18, 2017. Eleven days later, searchers found her body roughly 300 miles away, behind a church in Charlotte, North Carolina — a discovery that would eventually reshape how the country alerts the public when adults go missing, even as the criminal case against the man accused of killing her remains stalled nearly a decade later.
Billie had arrived for her overnight shift at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia Beach, according to OurBlackGirls, which reports she was studying culinary arts at the Art Institute of Virginia Beach and had taken the job at the base sandwich shop. Her family, including a father who served 24 years in the Army and a mother who was also a military veteran, believed the base offered a secure place for her to work, according to the Williamsburg Yorktown Daily. Billie herself had not been able to enlist like her parents because epilepsy-related seizures barred her from military service, the outlet reported.
Surveillance footage showed Billie’s Mini Cooper entering the base shortly before 5 a.m. and exiting the installation about 30 minutes later at 5:33 a.m., driven by a person in light-colored clothing, per the account cited by OurBlackGirls. A residential camera then recorded the vehicle stopping 11 minutes later near a Norfolk construction dumpster, where workers later found Billie’s cellphone. The car itself turned up abandoned five days later in the Ocean View section of Virginia Beach, according to the same report.
A Suspect With Base Access and a History at the Shop
Federal charging documents identified Eric Brian Brown, a retired Navy petty officer who had served 21 years, as the suspect in Billie’s abduction. Court documents cited by OurBlackGirls state Brown visited the Blimpie restaurant almost daily and had once made a crude sexual remark toward Billie. He had also worked on the construction crew that built the sandwich shop, according to the Williamsburg Yorktown Daily, which reported that Brown maintained access to military facilities using his retired veteran identification card…