Adre’anna grew up in Tillicum, a neighborhood in Lakewood, Wash. “Adre’anna was a delightful girl, wanting to help, desiring to please,” David Anderson, who served as her youth pastor at the then-named Tillicum Baptist Church, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
Jean Olson, Church Clerk and Sunday school teacher alongside Anderson, concurs. “I would see her playing in the neighborhood, always looking happy, but often alone,” Olson tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
The morning of December 2, 2005, Adre’anna—unaware a snowstorm had cancelled school—walked her usual three-block trek. Adre’anna’s parents, Yvette Gervais and Jon Federici, who last saw her when she left for school around 7:52 a.m., didn’t have a landline phone in their apartment and therefore didn’t learn via the Clover Park School District phone tree about the snow day. Still, school employees who were in the building despite the closure did not see Adre'anna arrive that morning.
When Adre’anna didn’t come home that afternoon, her mother reported her missing, sparking a community-wide search.
Tillicum residents looked for Adre’anna all evening and into the following day. “Our team was assigned the railroad tracks, buildings along the tracks, ditches to one side or the other, all nooks and crannies,” Anderson recalls.
Investigators sought out alibis from the neighborhood's 51 registered sex offenders.
Olson notes that “Tillicum is a small one-square-mile community,” so “when she wasn’t located within that first day, I didn’t think there would be a good outcome.”
Subsequent searches over four months yielded no clues. “Four months feels like an eternity when your loved one is missing and likely in danger. It feels like four lifetimes,” Charlene Shunick, founder of the Resource Association for Missing People and Shunick Missing Persons organizations, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
Three years prior to Adre’anna’s disappearance, Adre’anna told police her father had punched her in the stomach and scratched her face when they investigated a domestic violence report at the family’s apartment. As a result, Federici pleaded guilty to a fourth-degree assault charge. He hasn’t commented publicly on Adre’anna’s disappearance., but police said Federici initially told them he walked Adre'anna part of the way down the block before turning back home on the day of her disappearance. However, elements of Federici's account changed in subsequent discussions.
No Answers
On April 4, 2006, Adre’anna’s skeletal remains were found when a group of kids playing in a field came across a skull and spine. The discovery was made one mile from where Adre’anna lived and across the street from a middle school. The following week, more of Adre'anna's bones were found in the same area. “This was the first incident of this kind in our neighborhood. The community was shocked,” Olson says.
The local medical examiner couldn’t determine a cause or manner of death due to the degradation of the remains, though authorities are investigating the case as a homicide. Investigators offered a $60,000 reward for information leading to an arrest but still haven’t received any leads.
This lack of closure is called “ambiguous loss.” “It becomes a mini cultural trauma,” Michelle Jeanis, associate professor in criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “[Communities] feel less safe because we don't know who the offender is. That can have long-term implications.”
A lack of coverage for crimes against Indigenous people may factor into why Adre’anna’s case remains unsolved. Between 2005 and 2009, 10,000 cases from Indigenous areas were sent to U.S. Attorneys Offices for prosecution—over three-quarters of the cases were violent crimes, and the USAOs declined to prosecute half of those cases.
“Murder is one of the highest reasons for death, higher than heart disease,” Jeanis says. “And they were largely missing from our national databases.”
Now, there may be hope for Adre’anna’s case.
Fresh Eyes
In April 2025, Adre’anna’s case was transferred to the Washington Attorney General’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Person (MMIWP) Cold Case Unit, which formed in 2023 to examine missing persons cases and cold cases involving Indigenous people.
Meredith Tise, a forensic anthropologist who owns Suncoast Forensics, thinks another unit taking over the investigation will be beneficial, as many medical examiners have limited training in the human skeleton, “A [forensic] anthropologist would be the one to say if there was any trauma present on her remains,” she tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
Human identification lab supervisor Dr. Amber Plemons echoes that the MMIWP Cold Case Unit might have better luck since forensic experts will be able to use methods and technologies that weren’t available in 2006.
“The natural environment can alter the condition of the skeleton,” she tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Forensic anthropologists can study those taphonomic changes—including animal scavenging, patterns of soil staining and sun bleaching—to understand what has occurred to the remains since the time of death.”
Determining manner of death may still be difficult as strangulation, asphyxiation or soft tissue wounds wouldn’t cause injuries on a skeleton, Dr. Eric Bartelink, an anthropology professor at California State University, Chico, explains: “In this case, the remains were skeletonized, which means the soft tissues had decomposed. The remains were spread over a large area [which] had been used as a homeless encampment and a trash dump.”
Bartelink tells A&E Crime + Investigation it’s unclear how much of Adre’anna’s skeleton was recovered, which could complicate matters if any missing remains had evidence of trauma.
The MMIWP Cold Case Unit declined A&E Crime + Investigation’s request for comment.
What Could Solve Adre’anna Jackson’s Case?
Touch DNA—DNA from skin cells that remain long after a person touches an item—may be advanced enough to determine who killed Adre’anna and how. “Evidence can be reexamined to determine if there are remnants of DNA beyond Adre’anna’s in hopes of identifying suspects,” Plemmons says.
Light the Way Missing Persons Advocacy Project Founder Shayna Richard emphasizes that to solve more cases like Adre’anna’s, systemic change must occur regarding data collection, media coverage and law enforcement transparency. “Public attention, especially in older cases, fades,” she tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “For these families, that pain doesn't. This work is about making sure no one is forgotten.”
Anderson hopes the MMIWP Cold Case Unit’s investigation will yield answers to his former pupil’s murder. “There is always hope that justice will prevail, that wrongs will be made right,” he says. “Only a no-stone-unturned approach into such matters as what happened to Adre’anna will uncover buried, dark secrets.”
