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By Ivan Pereira and Christina Santucci

May 11, 2011

Relatives of Demika Moore worry that her young daughter will never know who killed her or why she was taken away.

Moore, a lifelong Jamaica resident, was found murdered last summer, and many of the details surrounding her death remain a mystery to her family.

“Zoe’s going to grow up one day and ask what happened to her mother, and I hope to be able to have some better answers than what I have now,” Leticia Moore-Jackson, the victim’s aunt, said about Moore’s 4-year-old girl.

Moore, 24, was described as friendly and outgoing. Everyone called her Mika. She was her mother’s only child and had two half-brothers, whom she had never met. Moore loved to sing — she took part in a choir, performed in a musical group called Paradise and appeared at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem.

In 2003, Moore graduated from Martin Van Buren HS with a passion for fashion and design.

“Mika could take any outfit and make it look good,” Moore-Jackson said of her niece.

She thought about going to a fashion school, but decided to take a job at a telemarketing firm.

In December 2004, however, a car accident changed Moore’s life forever, her family said. Moore and her friends were traveling to her workplace in Mineola, L.I., when the driver of the vehicle lost control.

Moore, who was in the front passenger seat, was the only one injured and suffered critical head trauma. She was rushed to Winthrop University Hospital on Long Island, where she underwent three brain surgeries. Her family feared she would die, but doctors were able to save her.

Doreen Harris, a cousin of Moore-Jackson’s who was close to Moore, said the accident and surgeries left her with a scar on the right side of her temple and a metal plate in her head.

The crash took its toll in other ways.

Moore was never 100 percent herself afterward and had problems with her short-term memory, her relatives said.

Moore-Jackson said she grew concerned about her niece when she began to disappear for days at a time.

“I would tell her, ‘Mika, just call me,'” Moore’s great-grandmother, Ida Moore, said. “I’d say, ‘You don’t have to tell me where you are, but just call me and let me know that you are okay.’ But she never did.”

Moore-Jackson also worried about her niece becoming too friendly with strangers.

“She was too trusting of people,” her aunt said.

Although Moore would return home safe and sound following her disappearances, she would not talk about her whereabouts and seemed embarrassed when relatives asked where she had been.

“We kept telling her, if you keep going out like this, something bad is going to happen, hoping that it never would. But unfortunately it came to reality,” Moore-Jackson said.

In January 2010, Moore left home for the last time. Months went by without word from her, and her family and boyfriend, with whom she had Zoe in 2006, grew more and more worried.

Relatives contacted police, who hung up posters throughout southeast Queens, but Moore-Jackson said they knew something was seriously amiss when Moore had not returned by Mother’s Day.

“We knew that if she did not come back for her daughter, something was seriously wrong,” she said.

On July 23, 2010, police found Moore’s body in the driveway of a house on Leslie Road in St. Albans, and neighbors said they had no idea how the young woman ended up there. At first, police did not identify Moore as the victim, but her family feared the worst after hearing news reports of a woman found with tattoos similar to Moore’s — one of which was the name “Zoe.”

Moore-Jackson said she then went to the 113th Precinct headquarters and identified her niece.

Authorities said Moore’s hands were bound with duct tape, and she died from a beating that caused severe injuries, including broken ribs.

The police are still trying to determine all the details surrounding her death, but as of late April, there had been no arrests in the case. Her family did not know where she was killed or where she had been during her six-month absence.

“I don’t know, and this is what haunts me every day,” Moore-Jackson said.

Moore’s body was found just 16 blocks from Moore-Jackson’s home.

“For six months I had no idea where she was, and now I’m thinking, was she in this neighborhood the entire time? Was she right there, somewhere 16 blocks away, the entire time?” her aunt asked.

The biggest hurdle, Moore-Jackson said, is the lack of information about the murder despite the family’s pleas for someone to come forward.

“We want justice to be done for my niece Mika. Nobody deserves to die the way she did,” Moore-Jackson said.

There is a $2,000 reward for information, and Moore’s relatives said they are frustrated by the silence.

“Somebody has to know something,” Moore-Jackson said. “Somebody knows something.”

Although the void left by her death will never be filled, relatives said some of their pain might be lessened if her killer was brought to justice and if they learned the circumstances leading up to her death.

“I know nothing will be able to bring her back, but I just want to know what happened to her and why,” Ida Moore, the great-grandmother, said.

They also want answers for Zoe.

“At this point, she doesn’t really understand. She knows her mommy went to heaven, and that’s what she knows,” Moore-Jackson said. “She doesn’t understand it at 4. She knows that when people go to heaven, they are not coming back.”