SHEEPSHEAD BAY, Brooklyn (PIX11) — Victoria Boomer-Harris was shocked when she received a mysterious letter addressed to her Sheepshead Bay apartment on Batchelder Street in the fall of 2021.
The letter writer, using a Bronx return address, claimed to have information about the disappearance of Boomer-Harris’ daughter, Aliyah, in August of 2015.
“Everybody in that building no [know] what happen to her,” the letter writer claimed, telling Boomer-Harris that her late uncle once lived on the first floor.
Aliyah Boomer was 27 when she vanished on Sunday, Aug. 15, 2015. She was supposed to attend her mother’s birthday celebration at a local church.
“Sunday, I called her, and I didn’t get an answer,” Boomer-Harris, a senior church pastor, recalled.
“So, we started the service, and Li Li still didn’t show up,” the mother added, using Aliyah Boomer’s nickname.
As the family pieced together the events of Saturday into Sunday that weekend, they learned Aliyah Boomer, the youngest of four sisters, had gone to a barbecue in Prospect Park with her girlfriend. The two women had an argument and then went back to the girlfriend’s house at 444 Columbia Street in Red Hook Houses. That’s the last time anyone saw Aliyah Boomer.
“She was a very outgoing, happy person,” said Zulema Hunt, Aliyah’s sister. “There was no reason to go missing.”
Aliyah Boomer apparently tried to call her sister Vanessa at 3 a.m. that Sunday morning, but the sister was sleeping and didn’t hear the message until 6 a.m.
Hunt said Aliyah Boomer was studying to become a certified nursing assistant and was still living with her mother in Sheepshead Bay, at Nostrand Houses.
That’s where the letter arrived last fall.
The letter writer said her uncle had been talking about his friend in Apartment 2-C, “your family member,” before he died. The writer claimed the missing woman had been hanging around with a man and woman who lived on the third floor.
“The people….sent her out on a drug run, I think they call it a ‘lick,'” the letter writer said. “She never came back. My uncle said they no [know] what happen to your family member,” the writer added.
Everyone in the building knows what happened to the missing woman, the writer claimed.
Aliyah Boomer’s mother talked to us about the content of the letter.
“I was asking my nephew and girlfriend ‘What’s a lick?'” the mother shared with PIX11 News. “She said, ‘When they send people out to sell drugs and things don’t go right, and they don’t show up.'”
When PIX11 News asked the mother if she thought this might have happened to her daughter, she responded “It might have.”
But Professor Joseph Giacalone of John Jay College, a retired NYPD Sergeant who once led a Cold Case Squad, said the letter writer could be trying to throw off the family and investigators.The motive is unclear.
Aliyah Boomer’s mother has suffered a lot of family losses in recent years, with her mother and grandmother and a sibling dying.
When we asked the mom how she deals with not knowing her daughter’s fate, she started crying and said she’s sad from “losing so many people in my family.”
Hunt, who opened a new store called Fire Drill on Nostrand Avenue, said she’s offering a $10,000 reward for information that could lead to her sister’s whereabouts.
She’s upset the case didn’t receive much attention, “because we’re African American and she was 27 when she went missing, and they consider her an adult,” the sister said.
Hunt said they’re just stuck at this point, more than six years on from Aliyah Boomer’s disappearance.
“My mother suffers from stress, depression, she’s a very Godly woman,” Hunt said, also telling us her mom is waging a battle against cancer.
Hunt has one goal.
“Just finding out what happened, and who was involved,” Aliyah Boomer’s sister concluded.
