To mark the ongoing search for Teekah, a candlelight vigil was held Monday night. Her family has held the vigil every year, and it’s open to the public. Teekah Lewis, 2, vanished from a Tacoma bowling alley nearly 24 years ago. A maroon late 1980s or 90s Pontiac Grand Am with tinted windows and a spoiler was last seen speeding away.
The story is tragic. Teekah went bowling with her mother and family at New Frontier Lanes along Center Street in Tacoma on Jan. 23, 1999. She was last seen playing in the arcade area of the bowling alley and was reported missing around 10:30 p.m.
This cold case is still advancing detectives to find and talk with the man they think committed this kidnapping. Officials described the man as white, between the ages of 30-40, about 5-foot-11-inches tall with a husky build. He had wavy brown hair, a thick mustache and pockmarks on his face, police said.
She is Black and Native American. At the time of her disappearance, she was 3 feet tall, 35 pounds, with black hair, brown eyes and pierced ears. She was wearing a green Tweety Bird T-shirt, white sweatpants and red, white and black Air Jordan shoes and suffered from asthma and allergies.
It is scary to think that the month before her abduction, a six-year-old boy was nearly taken from the same bowling alley, and a young boy was molested in the restroom the previous December.
In April of 1999 – just a couple of months after Teekah’s disappearance – the “Teekah Lewis Bill” passed in Washington state. It created a multi-agency task force within the Washington State Patrol. This task force would put more local and regional police on the case when they were dealing with reports of missing and exploited children, and could be mustered together in emergency situations.
During a vigil held on the 11 year anniversary of Teekah’s disappearance in 2010, a man would tell Teekah’s mother, Theresa, about a vision he had about the still-missing girl, claiming to know where she was. Theresa, who had never seen this man before, said that what the man told her was unnerving enough to the point of forwarding this information to police, who began looking into the man and his claims.
