Woman's disappearance baffles friends and family01/14/2008
OAKLAND — Aaron Stokes was taking a shower on that cold November morning when his sister Amanda said she was headed out to run errands.
"I yelled from the shower 'I love you ...' She just tapped on the door and said goodbye," the 28-year-old Oakland man recalled.
Those words, said not long after the two argued so loudly neighbors overheard them, were his last to his older sister.
Amanda "Mandy" Stokes, 33, walked out the door of her Merritt Avenue apartment
wearing running pants and carrying her wallet, identification, cell phone and iPod. She climbed into her 2001 black Honda Accord and drove off from her Adam's Point apartment.
Where she went or who she saw is a mystery. Why she never came home on Nov. 25 and remains missing seven weeks later is another mystery entirely.
Some think the woman, who friends and family described as severely depressed, may have committed suicide. Those who know her say she was battling an alcohol addiction and still grieving the death of her father, who died four years ago.
Others believe she might be alive somewhere, being held against her will. Her Honda was found on Park Boulevard two days after she disappeared. Homicide detectives are investigating the case because they have not ruled out foul play.
Her family, including seven brothers and sisters, as well as friends, former co-workers, police and her boyfriend, are baffled.
"I wish I had some idea," said brother Aaron Stokes, a former restaurant worker who lived with his older sister for about one month before she went missing.
"Even me being as close as I was to my sister, I literally know as much as you do," he said. "It's so unbelievable. It's more unbelievable than a movie. It's the not knowing. ... There's no closure on anything."
Investigating missing person's cases is something that keeps Oakland police plenty busy. Last year, 2,100 adults and juveniles were reported missing in Oakland, police said.
The cases included everything from juvenile runaways to Alzheimer's patients who wandered off to adults who were gone for a few days on a tryst.
Police said a majority of people are found or eventually come home on their own.
But some don't.
'Very trusting'Those who know Amanda Stokes said she may have unknowingly put herself at risk and become a victim of a crime.
She was not working when she went missing. But Sarah Schirrel, 25, worked with her last summer at Cafe DiBartolo on Grand Avenue and remembers her as a welcoming and friendly employee who treated customers with "Southern hospitality."
"Being from North Carolina, she was very giving and very trusting," Schirrel said. "She talked to people like she had known them forever."
When she went missing, Amanda Stokes was depressed and battling a drinking problem that had gotten so bad she was taking Antabus, a drug prescribed to alcohol abusers or alcoholics. The drug can cause nausea, low blood pressure and chest pain if alcohol is consumed while taking the drug, according to many friends and family.
"We both noticed that when she had a couple drinks, she would turn into a different person," said boyfriend Jon Krug of New York.
Amanda Stokes was contemplating moving to New York to be with Krug, 29, a man she met in Las Vegas on a vacation two years ago and had been involved with seriously for about four months. But she wasn't certain about it and that ambivalence was wreaking havoc on her, Krug said.
Paul Vietzke, 48, worked with Amanda Stokes at a Piedmont Avenue bar where she had previously been a cocktail waitress. He said she was always professional on the job, but when she got off work and started to drink, things changed.
"She knew she was an attractive girl," he said. "She could go up to a guy at a bar and get him to buy her a drink."
Vietzke said Amanda Stokes would tell him about the different guys she was seeing in San Francisco and Oakland, as well as Krug in New York City.
Friends worry that a relationship with a man may have played a role in her disappearance.
"She bopped around a lot and was always checking her cell phone," Vietzke said. "She seemed to have goals but got distracted."
Vietzke said he is worried that on Nov. 25 she parked her car on Park Boulevard and then wandered along the edge of Dimond Canyon, which runs from Dimond Park up to Highway 13. He said he believes she might have been under the influence of something and fell and hurt herself. Police have searched that area.
Police have also searched her apartment, looking for evidence of foul play, and tracking dogs have searched the area around the 5000 block of Park Boulevard — about three miles from her apartment — where her Honda was found blocking traffic on Nov. 27.
"We've looked in a lot of places, a lot of areas that we thought she might frequent," said Oakland police Sgt. Derwin Longmire. "We certainly tried to put in the time that we could in looking for her."
Longmire also questioned Aaron Stokes about the disappearance, asking about their argument.
A family tiffAaron Stokes was reluctant to be interviewed for this story and will only give the most basic of details about the "tiff" the two had that Sunday morning.
He said the two had argued because his sister, in her depression and uncertainty about the future, was thinking about moving to Atlanta to live with their mother, Deborah Murray.
Aaron Stokes said he tried to convince his sister running away to deal with her depression problems would not solve anything.
Before the Sunday when she went missing, Amanda Stokes had spent a month with Krug in New York, returning to Oakland just four days before she disappeared. They had gone camping, visited restaurants and explored the city together.
Krug said she seemed fine when she was there, but when she returned, she fell apart, struggling with her emotions around her father's death, her employment status and uncertainties about her future.
"She definitely had a complete mental breakdown," Krug said. "She was extremely upset."
Krug doesn't believe Aaron Stokes is connected to her disappearance, but said he believes she might have committed suicide.
"She was suicidal that Thursday after she left New York," Krug said. "I figured she would be OK just being there. I never thought of her disappearing."
Police said suicide has not been ruled out. Her brother doesn't think that's a likely scenario.
"Personally I don't think that she did," Aaron Stokes said. "There's a part of me that thinks she's very much alive and knows what's going on. I don't think she committed suicide."
His sister never made threats in front of him about suicide, Aaron Stokes said.
He also said he doesn't know anyone who wanted to hurt his sister. "I've wracked by brain thinking about this. I can't think of anyone," he said.
He also downplays the argument between the two as something that would have driven his sister to kill herself or leave and not comeback.
"It was a little tiff about our family," he said.
But that "tiff" was, in part, the subject of a nine-hour interrogation by Oakland Police investigators, who questioned Aaron Stokes about his sister's disappearance, Aaron Stokes said.
"I tried to talk to them, but they kept railroading and accusing me," he said.
He was not arrested in connection with the disappearance but spent Dec. 13 and 14 in jail on an unrelated matter concerning bad checks, police said.
Longmire said Aaron Stokes was interviewed because he was "one of the last people to speak with Amanda Stokes."
"Out of all the people I've talked to, he's most knowledgeable about the last time and the last place she was seen or heard from," Longmire said. "He was the last person known to be with her."
Longmire said Aaron Stokes has been "semi-cooperative" but added that he "has not extended himself to aid in this investigation."
Asking if Aaron Stokes is a suspect, Longmire declined to answer. He said police are "not looking at anyone in particular" as suspects in the case.
Worry, waitHer disappearance has taken a toll on her family and friends, including Melinda Wiggins, 32, a childhood friend from North Carolina who shared an apartment with the missing woman after Amanda Stokes relocated to Oakland more than year ago.
"I was so excited she moved out here," Wiggins said.
The two were like sisters.
They had slumber parties together, cooked for one another, and gave each other motivation in their program at John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, where Amanda Stokes had been studying to be a psychologist before taking a semester off, her mother said.
Wiggins said her friend earned straight As in the beginning, but later began to lose focus.
"Mandy was so smart but really depressed," Wiggins said. "She was also having nightmares about her father."
Amanda Stokes went missing one week before the anniversary of her father's death of a heart attack.
Wiggins said Amanda Stokes kept her father's ashes in her room and on certain occasions, including his birthday and anniversary of his death, it triggered her depression.
"His death was something she never had distance from," Wiggins said. "She never got over it."
She used alcohol to deal with the pain, Wiggins said.
"She was self-medicating and she had a lot of guy friends because she needed the attention," Wiggins said.
The two grew apart and Amanda Stokes slipped further into depression, Wiggins said. They stopped living together and their relationship grew strained.
"I didn't want to upset her because I knew she was in a delicate state," Wiggins said, "but at the same time I thought being with her made it worse."
Wiggins said she is afraid the breakup in the friendship may have contributed to the missing woman's eventual breakdown around the time she went missing.
But now, she and everyone else just want to find her and bring her home.
"I'm just trying to get by," her mother, Murray, said in a phone interview from Atlanta. "I just want to find Mandy."
Anyone with information is asked to call Oakland police at (510) 238-3641. Print a poster:
http://www.projectjason.org/aan/AAN_AmandaStokes.pdf
