The Unsolved Disappearance of Yasmin Acree

A teenage girl went to sleep in her basement bedroom and vanished in the night.

Jennifer Baldwin
5 min readOct 14, 2021

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Source: Chris Lynch on Unsplash

Not everyone is lucky enough to live a charmed life. There are those whose lives start out difficult from childhood and never seem to improve. They are the unlucky ones, and, sadly, some of their lives are short.

Yasmin Acree

Yasmin Acree was an intelligent 15-year-old girl who was dealt a problematic hand early in her life. She was born in Kentucky to a mother who was a drug addict. Yasmin and her brother, Damarcus, were removed from their mother’s care as toddlers.

Both children were placed in the foster care system. While they were safe from their mother, it wasn’t the end of Yasmin’s abuse. She had been placed in a situation where she suffered from sexual abuse that she could not escape. Naturally, this led to her developing severe emotional and behavioral problems.

Yasmin’s Aunt

In 2001, Yasmin and her brother went to live with their aunt by marriage, Rose Mae Starnes, in an apartment in Chicago, Illinois. Rose eventually adopted the siblings five years later. It should have been a safe environment for the children, but there was trouble on the horizon.

Rose truly loved Yasmin but had trouble dealing with her behavioral issues that had stemmed from her abuse. Rose was known to occasionally discipline Yasmin by whipping her with a belt or by locking her in the basement, where her bedroom was located.

When Yasmin’s brother, Damarcus, was 16-years-old Rose asked him to move out of the family home. While Damarcus obliged, it left Yasmin as the only child in the apartment with Rose.

Up to that point, Yasmin had been an excellent student in middle school but had started falling behind as a freshman at Austin Polytech Academy. However, she found great joy in playing sports at the North Lawndale YMCA and was also looking forward to starting a new job at the YMCA.

Missing

On January 15, 2008, Yasmin had spent the day at the YMCA before coming home and doing a load of laundry. Soon after, she went to bed, but she was never seen by her family again. Rose…

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Jennifer Baldwin

Teacher * Psychology * Unsolved Crime * Forensics * Mystery * Animal Lover * Fashion * Southern California