Ashanti Billie was 19 years old, working at a Blimpie sandwich shop on a Virginia Navy base, when she vanished before dawn on September 18, 2017. Eleven days later, searchers found her body roughly 300 miles away, behind a church in Charlotte, North Carolina — a discovery that would eventually reshape how the country alerts the public when adults go missing, even as the criminal case against the man accused of killing her remains stalled nearly a decade later.
Billie had arrived for her overnight shift at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia Beach, according to OurBlackGirls, which reports she was studying culinary arts at the Art Institute of Virginia Beach and had taken the job at the base sandwich shop. Her family, including a father who served 24 years in the Army and a mother who was also a military veteran, believed the base offered a secure place for her to work, according to the Williamsburg Yorktown Daily. Billie herself had not been able to enlist like her parents because epilepsy-related seizures barred her from military service, the outlet reported.
Surveillance footage showed Billie's Mini Cooper entering the base shortly before 5 a.m. and exiting the installation about 30 minutes later at 5:33 a.m., driven by a person in light-colored clothing, per the account cited by OurBlackGirls. A residential camera then recorded the vehicle stopping 11 minutes later near a Norfolk construction dumpster, where workers later found Billie's cellphone. The car itself turned up abandoned five days later in the Ocean View section of Virginia Beach, according to the same report.
A Suspect With Base Access and a History at the Shop
Federal charging documents identified Eric Brian Brown, a retired Navy petty officer who had served 21 years, as the suspect in Billie's abduction. Court documents cited by OurBlackGirls state Brown visited the Blimpie restaurant almost daily and had once made a crude sexual remark toward Billie. He had also worked on the construction crew that built the sandwich shop, according to the Williamsburg Yorktown Daily, which reported that Brown maintained access to military facilities using his retired veteran identification card.
Brown acknowledged being on the naval base the night before Billie disappeared but claimed he blacked out and could not remember his movements over the following days, per OurBlackGirls. Investigators reportedly found that his devices searched for terms including “police looking for man” and “Amber Alert Sept 2017,” though the outlet notes his devices showed no use on the day Billie actually disappeared. DNA recovered from clothing on Billie's body was consistent with Brown's DNA profile, according to the same reporting.
Billie's body was recovered behind East Stonewall AME Zion Church in Charlotte — a location OurBlackGirls reports sits approximately 300 yards from Brown's childhood home, where he had attended vacation Bible school as a child. Her autopsy listed the cause of death as undetermined trauma, according to the outlet. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police charged Brown with murder, while he was separately charged with federal kidnapping in 2017 and later indicted on counts of kidnapping resulting in death, assault, and stalking, per OurBlackGirls.
Death Penalty Dropped, Then the Case Froze
Brown's federal kidnapping charge carried capital punishment eligibility, and prosecutors held jurisdiction because Billie had been transported across state lines from Virginia to North Carolina. In August 2019, federal prosecutors announced they would not seek the death penalty against Brown following a directive from then-Attorney General William Barr, according to WUSA9.
The case has not moved toward trial since. A federal judge found in 2020 that Brown remained mentally incompetent and could not be restored to competency through medication, per OurBlackGirls. His indictment has not been dismissed, and prosecutors may move forward only if Brown is later found competent to stand trial, the outlet reports — leaving the criminal case in an indefinite holding pattern.
How Billie's Case Closed a Gap in Missing-Person Alerts
Because Billie was 19, she fell into a legal gap that existed at the time: AMBER Alerts were restricted to minors under 18, while Silver Alerts primarily targeted elderly or cognitively impaired adults, according to the U.S. Office of Justice Programs' Bureau of Justice Assistance. That gap meant no immediate public alert system existed to broadcast her disappearance in the crucial early hours.
Billie's parents pushed for change, and Virginia became the first state to act, with Governor Ralph Northam signing legislation creating a state-level Ashanti Alert in April 2018 — eight months before a federal law followed, per WUSA9. The state law authorized Virginia State Police to broadcast alerts across highway electronic message signs, the outlet reported. The federal Ashanti Alert Act was signed into law on December 31, 2018, establishing a national framework for alerting the public when adults ages 18 to 64 disappear under dangerous or suspicious circumstances.
The federal law authorized $3 million in annual funding from 2019 through 2022 to help the Department of Justice build the National Ashanti Alert Network and support voluntary state alert plans, according to a press release from U.S. Sen. Mark Warner. State and tribal participation in that network remains voluntary. In August 2024, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a dedicated “Missing and Endangered Persons” event code for the Emergency Alert System, standardizing how Ashanti Alerts reach phones, radio, and television broadcasts — a code that also covers missing and endangered Indigenous persons on tribal lands, per the FCC.
States have kept adopting their own versions of the law well after the federal statute passed. Wyoming established its state framework in 2023, and Kentucky introduced similar legislation in 2024, according to Wyoming Public Media. Civilian and law enforcement search efforts for Billie in September 2017 had covered more than 300 miles between Virginia Beach and Charlotte before her body was found, underscoring the jurisdictional challenges that delayed early notifications and helped drive the push for coordinated cross-border alert networks, per the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Hoodline has previously reported on Ashanti Alerts issued in cases from Virginia to North Carolina, part of a growing pattern of states using the framework Billie's case inspired to search for missing adults. OurBlackGirls, an independent, reader-supported publication, describes her case as the origin point for that now-nationwide alert system — even as the prosecution meant to hold her accused killer accountable remains on indefinite hold.
