“I really miss her, and I think of her everywhere I go,” Sydnee Turner told Dateline.
Sydnee’s sister Tonee Turner vanished on December 30, 2019. The 22-year-old was last seen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“When she went missing, my whole life changed,” Sydnee added.
Sydnee told Dateline that their family is from Pittsburgh. “We did a little bit of living in Braddock, but then we moved to Turtle Creek for the majority of our childhood,” she said. “That was fun. The people were really nice. Everything was really lovely and easy.”
Tonee is the youngest of three girls. “She was drawing on the walls of my mom’s house until she was, like, 16,” Sydnee said of her sister. “She just had that artist’s spirit. Inspired all the time.”
Tonee and Sydnee are just one year apart. “You know, you have relatives you don’t always get along with them. But she was my sister and my bestie,” she said. “She didn’t care about causing problems for anyone. She wanted people to feel good around her -- to make them feel good and enjoy life.”
At the time of her disappearance, Tonee was living in Hazelwood — a neighborhood in Pittsburgh — with her boyfriend and her best friend.
Sydnee said she spoke to her sister just a few days before she disappeared. “It was just a little text or a little phone call — it was just something minor,” she recalled. “I remember she was supposed to move in with me and my friends in Braddock on the first. I was just thinking, ‘Well, you’re gonna move in like four days, so we’ll just talk then.’”
Sydnee told Dateline that Tonee and her boyfriend had been going through a break-up. “They wanted to be together, but they couldn’t have that proximity,” she said. “So, I was like, ‘Tonee, come move in with me. All my friends know you; we all love you. It’ll be a perfect solution.”
But Tonee never did get to move in with her sister.
Sydnee told Dateline that she got a call from a family member on December 30. “Someone in my family told me, ‘Oh, Tonee lost all of her stuff. I have it, I got it from a fireman,’” Sydnee recalled. She said that it was a regular occurrence for Tonee to misplace her things, so she wasn’t alarmed. “So, on December 31, I’m, like, going to my aunt’s house. Chit-chatting. I think everything’s normal. ‘Tonee lost her stuff.’”
But Sydnee said she began to worry when she realized how much stuff her sister had lost. “It wasn’t just a phone. It wasn’t just her wallet. She had lost her wallet, her phone, her keys, her bag. Like, everything,” she recalled. “So, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s weird, but I’m sure everything’s fine. I’m gonna drive to her house and give her this stuff.’”
Sydnee told Dateline that Tonee’s boyfriend and best friend were both out of town at the time, so Tonee had been staying home alone. “I just burst in there screaming, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ And then when I go through the house and I see she’s not there, I just take a seat and I realize the gravity of the situation and everything changes,” she said.
“So, now I’m snooping through her phone, like, ‘OK, did she text someone? Is there something weird going on here?’” Sydnee said. She didn’t see anything suspicious on her sister’s phone. “Now, I have to call the family. Now, I have to call the police.”
On January 1, 2020, Sydnee reported her sister missing. “We reported her missing, literally, on New Year’s Day. The ball dropped. It was midnight. It was so terrible,” she remembered.
The Pittsburgh Police Department is investigating Tonee’s disappearance. According to their press release from the day she was reported missing, Tonee was last seen on December 30, 2019, around 6 p.m. Investigators believed she may have been in the Homestead area — not far from her home in Hazelwood.
Dateline reached out to the Pittsburgh Police Department for an update on the case but has yet to receive a response.
Sydnee told Dateline that her sister went to Dobra Tea in Pittsburgh earlier in the day and then headed home. She said Tonee got off at her regular bus stop that evening on the corner of Hazelwood Avenue and Giddings Street. “She got off where she normally gets off to walk to her house. But then after that, it’s a mystery,” she said. It is unclear if Tonee made it home.
The bus driver happens to be Sydnee’s neighbor. Sydnee said he recalled seeing Tonee that day. “He said she seemed very sad,” she recalled.
According to Sydnee, the person who found her sister’s belongings located them on the Homestead Grays Bridge, about two miles from the bus stop. “Those are the first pieces of evidence, the first clues,” she said.
Sydnee told Dateline that she isn’t sure exactly what happened to her sister, but she has a theory. “The community she’s living beside — she’s friends with some of the people. They all know she’s all by herself,” she said. “So maybe the back door wasn’t locked. I don’t know.”
“I just want wherever she is -- her to be at peace, her to be enjoying herself. I don’t want her to be living the worst reality a human being can experience. I did everything in my power to bring clarity to her story and find her. But obviously, it wasn’t enough,” she said. “I think of her everywhere I go and her not being a part of my life basically became my life.”
It’s hard not to think of her sister, especially since there’s a mural in their home of Pittsburgh created in her honor. “She was really tapped into the art community in Pittsburgh,” Sydnee said. “They made a mural of her so that she would always be remembered -- her face would always be remembered, and, um, we could have a piece of her with us because she’s gone.”
Tonee is 5’2” and weighed 130 lbs., with chin-length black hair at the time of her disappearance. She was last seen wearing a black zip-up jacket, a gray shirt with “Habla Espanol” in orange lettering on the back, grayish-colored cargo pants, and possibly a black head wrap. Her nose and ears are pierced, and she has a labret piercing under her bottom lip. She also has a tattoo of a spiral pattern on her left shoulder.
Anyone with information about Tonee’s disappearance is asked to call the Pittsburgh Police Department at (412) 323-7141.