A month after disappearance, friends of missing SC mother plan Upstate search parties

Family and friends of missing mother Alexis Ware plan to spend the weekend searching for her.

More than 60 people have signed up as of midday Friday to look in areas Ware was last seen — Greenville, Anderson, Abbeville, Greenwood and Modoc, where her car was found a few days after her Jan. 30 disappearance.

Ware, a hair stylist who lived in Greenville, was last seen by the father of her youngest child on Highway 29 North in Anderson County at a 7-Eleven. She left her two children with him with plans to meet at his mother’s house.

At a red light, he said Ware went around him and fled into the night.

Her phone was last pinged in Abbeville on Jan. 30, and her car was seen that night going into and coming from Georgia.

Justin Hunt, a moderator with the South Carolina Black Activist Coalition, said coalition members believe they know why Ware disappeared and who was involved. The search is intended to bring closure despite what he called tepid response from Anderson County Sheriff’s Office, the lead agency on the case.

“We’re not going to sit around twiddling our fingers,” he said.

Hunt said the organization, founded in January 2021, has conducted two other searches, including 15-year-old Sanaa Amenhotep, who body was found in woods near Interstate 20 last April. The other case was a 15-year-old who was found alive.

Ware’s family members renewed their request this week for the FBI to get involved, as it did when Gabby Petito, a white woman, was missing last September. Petito’s body was found in Wyoming. Her boyfriend, who died by suicide, admitted in a notebook that he had killed her, the FBI said.

“We’re tired of begging,” activist Bruce Wilson said in a news conference in front of the federal building in Greenville on Thursday. Members of Ware’s family stood beside him holding missing person flyers.

Shevai Durham, a friend, said, “We all want Lex to come home.”

A spokesman for the FBI released a statement last week saying the agency would help if asked but feels confident the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office has the resources to handle the case.

“She is labeled as a missing person, but we believe she has been kidnapped,” her mother, Alberta Gray, said in a phone interview with The State last week.

Ware’s red Honda was found on Feb. 2 covered in mud on a rural road in McCormick County, 70 miles from where she left her children, by a nearby property owner.

Gray said her daughter’s cellphone and purse were inside the car.

Gray said investigators have told her they were able to get fingerprints from the car, but they have not said whether the prints belonged to Ware or someone else.

Capt. Steve Reeves of the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office declined to talk about the evidence.

Searches are planned for:

• 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 100 S. Greenwood St., Abbeville
• 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 1900 N. Main St., Anderson
• 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, 513 Bypass 72, Greenwood
• 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, 11443 Highway 28, Modoc

Hunt told potential searchers on Facebook they are going to use the information that is known, not trying to analyze what happened or could have happened. Several Facebook pages are full of speculation about Ware’s disappearance.

“The specific purpose is to bring the Queen home and ensure she is safe,” he said.

This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 2:14 PM.