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Girl, 8, Vanishes from Her Georgia Neighborhood and 14 Hours of Search Time Are Lost
Shy'Kemmia Pate, called Shy Shy by those who knew her, disappeared on September 4, 1998 from Unadilla, Georgia while playing outside.
Nearly 26 years after 8-year-old Shy'Kemmia Pate vanished from her Unadilla, Georgia neighborhood, her grieving family is still desperate for answers.
“It’s a storm that never [stops] storming in your life,” her mom Veronica Pate told the Dateline: Missing in America podcast, now in its third season.
Shy'Kemmia, called Shy Shy by those who knew her, disappeared the night of September 4, 1998, as her older sister was preparing to go to a high school football game in Vienna, Georgia.
“The plan was for me to bring her with me to the game, so yeah she was excited about going,” LaSwanda Hickey, who was 17 at the time her sister disappeared, told the podcast’s "The Night Shy Shy Disappeared" episode.
But by the time Hickey was ready to leave for the game, she couldn’t find Shy Shy, who had been playing outside.
More than two decades later, investigators say they have two persons of interest in the disappearance, but Shy’Kemmia remains missing.
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Who is Shy'Kemmia Pate?
Before she disappeared, Shy'Kemmia was a happy child. The last school photo taken of her shows the third-grader beaming at the camera, with her long braids pulled to one side.
“Everybody loved her,” Shy Shy’s mom, Veronica, told Dateline. “She loved her school.”
Veronica said chronic asthma and kidney disease meant Shy'Kemmia spent lots of time in the doctor’s office and often had to miss class, but she kept up with her schoolwork.
What happened the day Shy'Kemmia Pate disappeared?
On the morning of September 4, 1998, Veronica walked her daughter to school and told her youngest child that she loved her, and she’d see her after she got home. Those parting words are burned into Veronica’s memory.
When school got out that afternoon, kicking off Labor Day weekend, Shy'Kemmia headed home and got ready for the high school football game she was eager to go to with her sister.
Hickey, the 8-year-old’s older sister, took a nap while Shy'Kemmia went outside to play, something children in their area did all the time.
“Everybody knew everybody,” Veronica said of the neighborhood in Unadilla, a city that only had about 1,600 residents in 1998. “And you know, our kids [were] out riding their bicycles, skating and everything.”
At around 6 p.m., Hickey saw Shy'Kemmia on a neighbor’s front porch as she drove by to get gas.
“I want to say she tried to flag me down. I’m not 100% sure if she tried to stop me or not, but I know I didn’t stop,” Hickey said.
After getting gas, she came back to pick up her sister at the house where she last saw her, but the little girl wasn’t there. The neighbors told Hickey that Shy'Kemmia had walked up the street. Hickey drove up the street to look for the child, but didn’t see her.
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Hickey was a Junior ROTC member at the time and helped bring out the flags at high school football games. She needed to be at the game by 7:30, so she called her mom, who wasn’t home yet. Veronica told her eldest daughter that Shy Shy was probably at a friend’s house, and that they’d get her “when we come back,” according to Hickey.
When Veronica got home at around 7:45 p.m., and Shy Shy still wasn’t there, she started calling around to see if the girl was at a friend’s place.
But no one knew where Shy'Kemmia was, and when she hadn’t turned up by the time her older sister got home from the game, Veronica called the Unadilla Police Department.
Veronica says police told her they needed to wait 24 hours after the child was last seen before they could act. So the family and neighbors took it upon themselves to search for Shy Shy that night, to no avail.
Dooly County Sheriff’s Office gets involved
The next morning — around 14 hours after Shy'Kemmia disappeared — Dooly County Sheriff’s Office investigator Randy Lamberth walked into the office and was surprised when dispatch asked if the missing little girl in Unadilla was found.
“And when I said, ‘What little girl?,’ that’s when we found out about it,” Lamberth told Dateline. “This was roughly mid-morning the next day.”
In 1998, the Dooly County Sheriff’s Office was one of two law enforcement agencies serving Unadilla. Veronica had called the Unadilla Police Department the night before.
Crucial hours of search time were already lost, so the sheriff’s office had to play catch-up.
Local, state and federal agencies were brought in to search for the child, starting at the family’s home and continuing house-to-house in the neighborhood. Aerial and ground searches were conducted that weekend, and dogs and four-wheelers were used to look for her in fields and woods, but there was no sign of the girl.
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Neighbors reported seeing Shy'Kemmia the night she vanished, with one person reporting the girl ate a hot dog at her house and others saying they’d spotted her outside alone. The last known sighting of Shy Shy was around 8:30 p.m. around the intersection of Crumpler Ave. and West St., about half a block from her home.
A club called Roxie’s was located across the street from where Shy Shy lived. “So, a dangerous area,” Lambert told Dateline. “You could classify it as that with the drug traffic and other crimes that took place at the club area.”
Besides operating as a nightclub, Roxie’s also served as a pool parlor and mom-and-pop store, for people of all ages from the neighborhood.
“We would always go to the store part, even when we were little kids,” Hickey told Dateline. “And they sold things for kids, candy, chips, pickles, pig feet, that kind of stuff.”
Lamberth and others working on the case think that Shy'Kemmia probably would not have gone anywhere with someone she didn’t know, leading them to believe she may have been taken by someone she knew.
Shy'Kemmia Pate’s mother slept by an unlocked front door for two years
For two years after her youngest daughter vanished, a devastated Veronica slept by the unlocked front door of their home in case Shy Shy walked in.
Veronica told Dateline how she’s managed to get by for all these years. “You just pray, and ask God to teach you how to put one foot in front of the other, hold your head up and smile,” Veronica said. “Even when you can’t smile, you still smile.”
Three years after Shy’Kemmia disappeared, Unadilla was in the news after a string of sexual assaults targeting young girls. In July of 2002, 20-year-old Quenton Kendrick — one of the last people to see Shy Shy, according to Lamberth — pleaded guilty to 16 charges in those attacks, including rape and kidnapping. He’s serving a life sentence. Kendrick lived about 200 yards from Sky-Kemmia.
Lamberth told Dateline that Kendrick and another unnamed man are persons of interest in Shy Shy’s case.
Kendrick told a local media outlet that he had nothing to do with the girl’s disappearance. Shy Shy’s mom, Veronica, who grew up with Kendrick’s mother and said he was a friend of her son, doesn’t believe he was involved.
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Veronica believes her daughter is still alive — and also believes she may have spoken with her.
In 2022, a woman from Missouri reached out to Shy Shy’s family through Facebook, which led to a phone called between Veronica and the woman. “She said she was Shy,” Veronica told Dateline.
The woman told her she’d been abducted but didn’t recall the details because she was too traumatized.
“She said, ‘If we never see each other again, I just want you to know that I ain’t dead,’” Veronica said. “And she said, ‘And I just wanna ease the pain that’s in your heart.’”
Veronica said she believed the woman. “It was like when I heard the voice on the phone, it’s like the pain… my heart just got relieved,” she told Dateline.
However, Lamberth said a DNA test confirmed the Missouri woman wasn’t Shy’Kemmia. Veronica says she doesn’t trust the swab test that was done and that the caller knew things that only Shy Shy would know. But Hickey isn’t convinced that the woman is her sister.
Veronica is still holding out hope that she’ll one day see her daughter again.
Today, Shy’Kemmia would be 34 years old. On the day she was last seen in 1998, she was wearing a neon green Atlanta Braves jersey with red lettering, jeans and a leg brace. Anyone with information about her disappearance is urged to call the Dooly County Sheriff’s Office at 229-645-0920 or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation at 478-987-4545.
