ST. LOUIS — Regina Sykes wears her heart on her sleeve with a tattooed portrait of her daughter Monica, whose disappearance and death now bonds her to other loved ones of murder victims and missing persons.
"It brings back all the memories, all the things that we experienced when we were searching for my daughter," she said of cases like the Gabby Petito case.
Sykes says the Petito case reminds her of her own experience sharing flyers and organizing searches for five months between Oct. 2016 and March 2017 until Monica's remains were found in a Kinloch field.
"It's important to understand the human side of it and to know that these are people with real life, real hopes, real dreams, and plans that now we don't know where they are," she said.
Sykes watched the national coverage of this case, optimistic to see so many people invested in the outcome.
"I do think it's important to share as much information as possible because you don't know who may have seen something, heard something, and how important it is going to be to locate her," she said.
Watching the coverage, she knew the moment when hope turned to heartbreak this weekend, FBI agent Charles Jones taking the podium to announce they had found human remains "consistent with a description of Gabrielle 'Gabby' Petito."
Sykes is now helping others with their own traumas, spending about twenty hours a week on the organization they founded, Monica's Voice, to bring as many missing people back home as they can.
"It's a part of me that I have to go on and keep her memory alive, keep Monica's memory alive," Sykes said. "I will never stop doing what I'm doing."
An ex-boyfriend, Ray Ellis, is serving life in prison for Monica Syke's murder.