Missing New Orleans teacher’s sister: ‘She just vanished’

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Family members of a missing 26-year-old schoolteacher say they are baffled by her disappearance, but determined to believe she is still alive.

Terrilynn Monnette was last seen March 2nd — in an image captured at around 5 a.m. by a red light camera in New Orleans, where she lived and taught second grade at Woodland West Elementary School. The image showed Monnette seemingly alone in the car, according to a cousin, David Dirks.

Previous news reports said she told friends, with whom she had gone to Parlays’ bar on the 800 block of Harrison Avenue in the Lakeview section of New Orleans, dressed in a light gray and green striped sweater and jeans, on the night of Friday, March 1st, that she was going to lie down in her car.

A feeling of disbelief

Her older sister, Kandice Enclade, doesn’t believe it.

“I know my sister and I know that she wouldn’t sleep in her car,” she told theGrio Wednesday night.

Enclade said she last spoke with her sister on the night she disappeared.

“It was basically a daily phone call that we always did,” she said. “I was actually on my way to the grocery story and she was on her way to dinner with her college friend that she always goes out with and a couple other friends. She was telling me about her nomination for teacher of the year and how excited she was about that. We told each other that we loved each other, which we always did, and then we said goodbye. And I never heard from her again.”

Enclade said her sister moved to New Orleans, where their family has roots, a little over a year ago. She went as an exchange student to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after graduating from California State University San Bernadino. One of the friends she went out with on the night of March 1st was a male friend from Southern. The two went out in a group. As far as the family knows, all of the friends were questioned by police, but there are no known suspects in Monnette’s disappearance.

Enclade said she and her sister, and their parents, are very close, and that they spoke daily. She said her sister only knew a small number of people in New Orleans. including the friend from college, and colleagues from work. She knows of no one who would want to harm her sister, whom she said “got along with everyone.”

An outpouring of support

Both Dirks and Enclade praised the support they have received from the New Orleans community. Mayor Mitch Landrieu attended one of the vigils for Monnette, and she said more than 300 people joined in the search for her sister in the area around the club. The family live in Long Beach, California, but have traveled regularly to New Orleans to keep up the search, and to keep Terrilynn’s name in the media. They said they have received support from Tom Joyner and Ricky Smiley, who have mentioned the case on their morning radio shows, from TV and radio personality Jacque Reid, the national spokeswoman for the Black & Missing Foundation (which has also taken up the case), and from comedians Kevin Hart and Kim Coles, who helped raised a portion of the now $20,000 reward in the case, via a comedy benefit in Los Angeles.

But despite the outpouring of support, there seems to be no trace of Terrilynn, or of her 2012 Honda Accord.