The remains of a 20-year-old woman from Fort Worth who went missing back in 2006 have been found, local police confirmed on Thursday.
A DNA test conducted by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office revealed that the remains discovered in a heavily wooded area near the railroad tracks along South Hughes Avenue in March were those of Taalibah Fatin Bint Islam.
Although investigators have not been able to determine the cause of death, an investigation has been opened into Islam’s death.
The last person believed to have seen Islam alive was her then-boyfriend and father of her infant child, Christopher Revill, according to The Charley Project.
Revill was arrested and charged with the aggravated kidnapping of another woman from Fort Worth named Typhenie Johnson in October 2016.
He was sentenced to life after being found guilty of kidnapping Johnson with the intent to kill her by a jury in 2018, despite her body never being found.
The community was rocked by the disappearances of both Johnson and Islam, with resident Art Sahlstein spearheading a community-driven search for the women over the past six years.
“A lot of times I’d ask myself, ‘Well why aren’t we finding things?’ Well, you just can’t lose hope. You just have to keep doing it,” Sahlstein told NBC 5 DFW. He noted they had scoured between 80 and 100 square miles looking for the women.
“My heart just dropped. I feel sorry for the family. My prayers go out to the family,” Johnson’s aunt Janelle Hofeldt said in light of the news of Islam, according to NBC 5.
Islam’s sister Hadiyah Islam has started a GoFundMe campaign to support the cremation costs, which are elevated due to the age of the remains.
“This is not the outcome my family and I were hoping for. But it’s a sad and hard truth of what could happen when you put your trust into the wrong people,” she noted in the post.
Murder is a tragedy all too familiar in nearby Dallas. The city’s murder rate spiked by more than 20% year over year during the first four months of 2023, with more recent data rendered unavailable by an alleged cyberattack on City servers in May.
Compared to that of its neighbor Dallas, Fort Worth’s city center actually sees significantly less crime. Fort Worth’s downtown area is patrolled by its own localized unit in collaboration with private security guards.
As The Dallas Express recently reported, the Dallas police have deployed a new violent crime task force in a hot-spot-based approach to tackle crime. While this new unit of 32 officers will focus on gun and drug crimes as well as gang activity, Dallas Police Department is still plagued by a significant shortage in numbers, according to a City document.
While the City’s target is 4,000 DPD officers, it is short by around 900, which police officials have said hinders crime fighting and erodes public confidence.
“You pay taxes, you expect the officer to show up … but sometimes we show up three, four, five hours later. It doesn’t do well for the relationship between the officer and the community,” said Dallas Police Association President Mike Mata, according to the Dallas Observer.
