COVINGTON, Ga. — The last time anyone saw or talked to 64-year-old Debra Ashby was Oct. 29. Her family said their last phone call with her was pleasant and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
“One of us she talks to every day. If it’s not by text, it’s by phone call,” her daughter-in-law, Heather Collette said.
At the time, Ashby’s family didn't know that would be the last phone call with her. Collette filed a missing person’s report after her son, Quincy, tried to check on her on Nov. 1.
“Her purse is missing, her medicine is missing, her phone, of course,” Collette said.
Since then, the family placed hundreds of flyers around Covington, one of which sits on a telephone pole directly across from her now-empty home.
“It’s horrible," Collette said. "This is the worst."
Covington Police said they haven’t been able to ping her phone to any cell towers and call her disappearance suspicious.
Collette and Quincy questioned Ashby’s boyfriend -- the last person to see her.
“I asked him, ‘Did you do anything to her?’ Of course, he says no. He says he wouldn’t hurt her,” Collette explained. “But we know otherwise. He has hurt her. He hurt her seriously. I don’t believe anything he says.”
11Alive isn’t naming the boyfriend because he’s not a suspect. Police have conducted interviews with him, but haven’t officially said if they believe he’s linked to her disappearance. A detective said the boyfriend was arrested in April for domestic violence against Ashby. Police called the attack “vicious.”
“The officer that was there, he said he’s never seen a domestic violence like that in his whole time of working and he’s been on the force for 15 years,” Quincy recalled.
Ashby, the major witness in the case against her boyfriend, was supposed to testify against him in an upcoming trial.
“We think maybe he did something to her possibly. We don’t know,” Collette said.
What the family does know is Ashby’s a family oriented person who would never just wander off and abandon them. She's a homebody with no car or work who relied heavily on her family.
Her boyfriend is currently in the Newton County Jail. Police arrested him one week after Ashby went missing, for violating the restraining order she had against him.
The family plans to hold a search party in the next few days.
Ashby was last seen wearing a gray shirt, blue jeans and a bandana style head wrap. She’s described by police as a Black woman who is 5-feet 3-inches tall, weighing around 112 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes.
Anyone with information on Ashby's disappearance should call the Covington Police Department at 770-786-7605.