A trial to honor our gone girl, Jhessye Shockley

There was never a proper funeral for 5-year-old Jhessye Shockley, but investigators came to believe they know where she is buried. The dump.

They spent weeks in the boiling summer of 2012 sifting through tons of garbage at the Butterfield Station Landfill in Mobile, south of the Valley, but they found nothing. It was a longshot at best.

But how could we not look for a little girl?

The trial of her mother, Jerice Hunter, charged with Jhessye murder, began in the same week that saw the end of the case against Debra Milke, convicted of orchestrating the murder of her 4-year-old boy, Christopher, in 1989 and released from prison due to what the courts found to be a botched prosecution. The accused mothers tend to get the attention in such cases.

But it's the children who deserve it.

We'll relive the awful days surrounding Jhessye's disappearance. When she was first declared missing her family said the national media didn't give her case enough attention because she is Black. They said the local media was too quick to suspect the girl's mother. But it had been reported early on that Hunter pleaded no contest to child-abuse charges in California and spent time in prison.

Jhessye was born before Hunter entered jail and was taken care of by relatives, some of whom expressed concern for her well-being.

A tip led Glendale police to search the landfill. It actually had been done before. The landfill has been holy ground since 1996.

(What else do you call a place that holds the body of a child?)

I went there in '96, shortly before crews began searching for the remains of 13-year-old Brad Hansen.

He was shot to death by a friend. They were said to have argued over a 12-year-old girl. Brad's body was placed in a trash bin. The boy who killed him eventually went to prison. The search for Brad went on for a long time, but he was not found. He's still there, perhaps with Jhessye.

I was told when I went there that by the time the landfill closes it will have created a 170-foot hill. It will have been formed by 35-ton trucks depositing load after load from places like Phoenix, only to have the trash compacted and spread out by other vehicles and covered with soil by others. Layer upon layer. Until from the top one can see the Sierra Estrella in one direction and the Maricopa Mountains in the other.

You can't help but wonder if, somewhere beneath your feet, are the remains of children.

There is a lesson in that.

Something I don't believe we learned during all of the years of news coverage of Debra Milke, when the memory of he son was all but disgarded while grown-ups got the attention. Along with the legal maneuvering. The most salacious details. The same could happen to Jhesseye, even as police identify what they believe to be her final resting place. But that's the lesson.

No matter where her remains may have come to rest this child, any child, is not trash.