The aunt of a recently deceased model was shocked when she received a phone call Sunday from her dead niece’s cell phone.
The phone went missing two months ago when 26-year-old Desiree Gibbon was murdered while in Jamaica looking for work. The case remains unsolved.
But for Peggy Brunner, the call — which was met with silence when she picked up — was evidence that there was still much more to the story. She received a second missed call from the number hours later.
When she tried to call back, the phone was not working.
“I got goosebumps from my head to my toes,” Brunner told the New York Daily News.
The phone calls added more pain to a family already frustrated with a slow-moving investigation by Jamaican authorities.
Gibbon, an aspiring model and documentary filmmaker, was found dead in a bush in St. James Parish on Nov. 26. She had disappeared three days earlier on Thanksgiving night after surveillance video from her family’s guesthouse showed her leaving her room. She was staying there while looking for temporary bartending work to save money for film school in Europe.
Gibbon’s throat had been slit and she was covered in bruises.
The surveillance video shows that she left without her wallet and local cell phone. She only carried her American cell phone, which remained dead until the calls to her aunt this past weekend.
“There are no answers,” Gibbon’s mother, Andrea Cali-Gibbon, said of the Jamaican police. “You feel like they’re not doing anything at all.”