Arrest in Aliayah Lunsford’s disappearance

Breaking news today: the mother of little Aliayah Paige Lunsford (whose name is pronounced ah-LEE-ah, btw), who disappeared in 2011 at the age of three, has been charged with child abuse causing death in her daughter’s disappearance. Lena Lunsford was arrested in Florida and will not fight extradition back to West Virginia.

That this has turned into a murder-without-a-body case is not surprising; Lena had been the prime suspect in Aliayah’s disappearance all along and the police had said they didn’t believe she had been abducted. Lena was pregnant with twins at the time of Aliayah’s disappearance and had four other children; she permanently lost custody of all six kids in the aftermath of Aliayah’s disappearance.

If you look at the photos of Aliayah — I’ve got six of them — she always looks unhappy. One of them, in some versions, had been Photoshopped to remove the large bruise on her cheek; I posted the original.

I can only hope that Aliayah’s siblings are leading happy lives now and that the family will get some answers out of Lena at last.

Articles:

• Mother of missing WV girl arrested in FL on child-abuse death charge
• Lena Lunsford arrested, charged with death of her daughter, Aliayah
• Sheriff: Lena Lunsford in custody on charge alleging death of Aliayah

 

A slight bump in my user statistics

I checked my user stats and saw this:

It is my understanding that “visits” represent the number of unique visits/visitors to charleyproject.org. And it’s up a bit for some reason. The average is currently 10,134 visitors a day. (Actually it’s 10,133.6; I rounded up. /pedantry) As opposed to last month when the average was 8,339. In May it was 8,171 and in April it was 8,070. Not much of a change there. Every day this month, though, save July 1, the number of visitors has been above the average 8,000-ish range.

Judging by the casefiles my visitors are looking at most often: Caleigh Harrison, Aliayah Lunsford and “Baby Kate” Phillips, I’d say the spike in visits has something to do with that unidentified little girl they found off the case of Massachusetts. I know there’s been speculation that one of the three missing girls could be her. Kristine Hamilton is also being looked at a lot though, and she DEFINITELY isn’t the Massachusetts Baby Doe and I can’t find any recent news about her. Shrug.