Nineteen years after 10-year-old Adre’anna Jackson disappeared and later was found dead, the Washington state Attorney General Office’s cold-case unit is reviewing her case.
Police consider the girl’s death the oldest unsolved homicide in Lakewood. After exhausting their capabilities and resources to investigate the case, Lakewood Police Department’s Sgt Charles Porche said, detectives have turned it over to the attorney general’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People (MMIWP) Cold Case Unit. Lakewood police forwarded the case to the unit in mid-2024, he said.
“We do not have a cold case unit and it was a case that the AGs office was willing to take after a consult with them,” Porche said in an email to The News Tribune.
Background on Adre’anna Jackson case
Adre’anna was walking to Tillicum Elementary School on Dec. 2, 2005, not knowing classes had been canceled from an overnight snowfall. She never made it to the school, according to previous News Tribune reports.
Her mother, Yvette Gervais, reported her daughter missing that afternoon when she did not come home. A search began that day. Lakewood police combed through Tillicum and the rest of the city, a News Tribune story reported. Divers searched American Lake, hoping to find answers.
Adre’anna’s disappearance turned into a homicide investigation after two boys found her skeletal remains in April 2006 in a thicket of blackberry brambles two miles from her family’s apartment on Wadsworth Street Southwest. Her cause of death has been undetermined, with the Medical Examiner’s Office ruling it also could not determine the manner in which she died.
Investigators have treated the girl’s death as a homicide, according to the FBI’s archives. State and federal forensics experts analyzed hundreds of items that were taken from her home and the lot where she was found, The News Tribune reported. The FBI also assisted before her remains were found.
“The FBI immediately investigates the mysterious disappearance of any missing child and the case of Adre’anna Jackson was no different,” a FBI spokesperson said March 19 in a statement to The News Tribune. “We offer FBI resources to assist our partners, the Lakewood Police Department in this instance, with their investigation. In this case, we conducted an extensive investigation which included, interviews of witnesses, technical resources, polygraph examinations, behavioral analysis, analytical assistance, the offering of a reward, and evidence recovery support.”
What is the MMIWP Cold Case Unit?
The unit was created and funded by the Washington Legislature in 2023 in response to recommendations from the MMIWP Task Force, according to the Office of the Attorney General’s website. The FBI’s archives show that Adre’anna was Native American.
“The purpose of the team is to assist federal, municipal, county, and tribal law enforcement agencies in solving missing person and cold homicide cases involving persons of Indigenous ancestry who go missing and are murdered at a higher rate than other demographics. It is the first unit of its kind in the nation,” the website says.
Mike Faulk, the deputy communications director for the AG’s Office, told The News Tribune via email that an investigation by the MMIWP Cold Case Unit begins when a local police agency or jurisdiction requests it. The process for the unit varies depending on the circumstances of each case.
Generally, the second step is that the team goes over the provided case file and reviews it independently. Faulk said cold-case investigators are doing that now in Adre’anna’s case.
The third step is the team then meets with the local agency to discuss possible next steps for the investigation, Faulk said.
Those steps include identifying additional people to interview, canvassing physical locations and “potentially using DNA and other investigative tools in addition to the work done by the local jurisdiction,” he said.
“Depending on what comes out of the investigation, local prosecutors could take legal action. If they ask us, we could agree to review the case for potential criminal charges,” Faulk said.
The MMIWP Cold Case Unit is working on 25 active cases, five are from Pierce County.
The unit’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year is $824,000, Faulk said. Their staff consists of one AGO supervisor investigator, four AGO senior investigators and one victim advocate/case navigator.
Faulk said he could not say much else about Adre’anna’s case since the cold-case unit is actively looking into it.
