By Nicole Chavez, Photo: Darlene Gomez, CNN US, May 5, 2022
Shawna Toya was eager to carry on her ancestor's legacy of pottery making in New Mexico when her mother's cellphone rang about 3:45 a.m. and the "worst call" came in last year.
"Oh no, it can't be... I just talked to her. You have the wrong person," Geraldine Toya recalls telling a police officer. Her 40-year-old daughter Shawna was found dead on July 31, 2021 inside her SUV at a park in Albuquerque. A few hours earlier, the family was celebrating a relative's birthday and they had made back-to-school shopping plans.
The circumstances of Shawna's death are still unknown nearly a year later. But she's among the thousands of missing or murdered Native Americans whose cases have gone unsolved in recent decades. This week, President Joe Biden declared May 5 as Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day for a second year in a row -- but advocates and families like the Toyas say a solution to the crisis is not in sight.
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