The text arrived at 3:50 in the morning. “I’m leaving. I’m not coming back.”

Teresa Gaines Colbert read it, and something inside her went cold. Not because she was surprised her daughter might leave. Because she knew, with a certainty that felt like a hand around her throat, that those words did not come from Ashanti.

“I immediately knew that my child was in danger,” Teresa later said.

She was right.

Twenty-three-year-old Ashanti Allen was eight months pregnant. She could barely walk on her own. Her high-risk pregnancy had confined her to a wheelchair for mobility. She had a hospital bag packed. She had a name for the baby boy she was expecting—Jackson. She had an apartment on Main Street in Houston, near NRG Stadium, just doors away from her mother. She was not going anywhere.

But someone wanted Teresa to believe otherwise.

On April 10th, 2026, Ashanti vanished. The text message came four minutes after a different kind of communication—one that would ultimately crack the case wide open. At 3:17 that morning, a woman received a FaceTime call from Kevin Fox, the 24-year-old father of Ashanti’s unborn child. He was outside. In a wooded area. Sweating. Frantic.

He told her he had hurt someone. Then he turned the camera and showed her.

After the call, he sent two text messages. The first: “I had to fight for my life.” The second: “I am a felon and I took someone’s life.”

That second message was timestamped 3:46 a.m.

Four minutes later, Teresa’s phone lit up with the lie.

Ashanti Allen was born on August 13th, 2002. She grew up in Houston, graduated from Marshall High School, earned her degree from community college, and landed a job as a patient care assistant at Ben Taub Hospital. She loved that job. She loved her dogs. She loved her PlayStation 5. She loved to sing to herself when she thought no one was listening.

“She was sweet,” her father, Edward, later said. “She went to community college, got a degree, was working for Ben Taub Hospital. She loved her job. She was doing good. She was great. Twenty-three years old. Had a career. Got pregnant. First baby. She was excited about that. Her life was going somewhere. It was going somewhere until unfortunately this happened.”

Ashanti and her mother Teresa were exceptionally close. They called themselves the mother-daughter duo. They lived in the same apartment complex. They talked about everything. When Ashanti started seeing Kevin Fox, her family welcomed him. They fed him. They took him to church. They gave him a car.

What they did not know was that Kevin Fox had a history.

Court records tell a darker story. As far back as 2019, Kevin was charged with aggravated assault. He served two years in prison in 2020. In 2021, he picked up another assault charge involving a different woman. That case was dismissed, but the pattern was already there.

Then, in September 2025, Kevin was charged with continuous violence against the family—a third-degree felony—after multiple physical altercations with Ashanti. He was booked into Harris County Jail. Because of his prior conviction, he faced two to twenty years.

But on February 19th, 2026, the state agreed to reduce the charge. Down from a third-degree felony to a Class A misdemeanor. Kevin was sentenced to 280 days. He walked out 138 days early. No ankle monitor. No probation. Nothing.

“He got a sweetheart deal on the first one,” a source close to the case later noted. “Only got two years. Could have been up to twenty. So he already got a deal. That’s what makes it even more disturbing—this was your second go-round, same type of offense, beating up your girlfriends, and this time you don’t go to prison.”

Ashanti’s family reportedly knew nothing about any of this. The September arrest. The plea deal. The violence behind closed doors. Ashanti kept every bit of it from them.

“I didn’t know anything about the incidents until she became missing,” Teresa said. “Because if I would have knew that, he would have never been around my daughter.”

The last time Teresa physically saw her daughter was April 8th, 2026. They talked. They said their goodbyes the way they always did. The next night, Ashanti texted her mother saying she felt dizzy and would come get the key the next day.

Less than four hours later, the fake text arrived.

On surveillance footage from Ashanti’s apartment complex, she was seen leaving around 2:25 a.m. with Kevin, who was reportedly driving her car. Then nothing.

The next morning, Teresa went straight to the apartment manager and asked for the key to Ashanti’s unit. Everything was still there. The hospital bag. The baby supplies. Everything. But Teresa’s white Lincoln SUV—the one Ashanti had been using—was gone.

She filed a missing person report with the Houston Police Department. She told them immediately: if something happened to her daughter, Kevin Fox did it.

Meanwhile, Teresa’s son tracked Ashanti’s phone. The signal led to the home of Kevin’s mother, Kimberly Young. When the family went there, Kimberly said the phone was not there. She called Kevin. He told them he had not seen Ashanti in over a week.

Then Kevin pulled up in Teresa’s car.

“Where’s my daughter, and how did you get my vehicle?” Teresa asked him.

He did not respond.

“We actually feel like she’s in danger at this moment,” a family member told reporters. “Like she’s not safe.”

Before police arrived, Kevin removed a bin of clothes from the area. Inside: muddy shoes. Teresa told the officers about it. She felt like they did not take it seriously enough that night.

After the family left Kimberly’s house, Kevin reportedly returned there. Kimberly did not call the police.

On April 10th—the same day Ashanti’s family was desperately searching—Kevin went to the welfare office, applied for food stamps, and got approved. Then he went to the mall, cleaned Teresa’s car out thoroughly, and removed even the decal from the vehicle.

That same day, he boarded a Greyhound bus to Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. He had a woman waiting for him there—someone he had been speaking with online, someone he had never met in person before that day. He told her he was involved in a missing person investigation involving his baby’s mother. He asked her not to look it up online.

He was using Ashanti’s debit card to fund the entire trip.

Ashanti’s cousin later posted about Kimberly’s role, describing how Kimberly called Kevin while the family was right there, how he came to the house and left through the back before police arrived, how Kimberly told the family he had gone to Atlanta. The next day, she waited until an hour after Kevin had already boarded a bus to Louisiana before giving them his location.

“Time’s not on our side,” Texas EquuSearch founder Tim Miller said as volunteers scoured nearby wooded areas, bayous, and waterways with ATVs and drones. The Black and Missing Foundation helped circulate Ashanti’s flyer nationwide.

Teresa made a direct public appeal: “Baby, we’re all looking for you. We want you back and safe. This is your first baby coming. My grandson. We just want you back.”

The family also put a message out directly to Kevin: “You are the only suspect. You have nowhere to hide. Be a man and come forward.”

On April 14th, the woman who received the FaceTime call finally came forward to Houston Police. She had waited four days. Court documents detailed what she described: Kevin, outside in a wooded area, sweating, frantic, telling her he had hurt someone, then showing her on camera.

Surveillance footage from a nearby business reportedly captured a man believed to be Kevin near Chimney Rock Park at approximately 3:20 a.m.—around the same time as that call.

On April 15th, Ashanti’s phone was found at Edgewood Park, near Kevin’s home. Location data pointed investigators to Chimney Rock Park along the banks of Willow Water Hole Bayou, near the intersection of Chimney Rock Road and Gasmer Drive in Southwest Houston.

On April 16th, search crews from Texas EquuSearch, Houston PD homicide detectives, and the crime scene unit found Ashanti.

Her father Edward was at work when he got the call.

“Being pregnant eight months with my first grandson, I can’t even imagine,” he said. “I can’t even tell you how I feel. My body is just completely numb. I don’t think I even processed the fact that my daughter is gone.”

“There’s been several disputes that I was not aware of because she didn’t tell us,” he added. “Her mom didn’t know. But now we got to this point. A lot of things is coming out about the past and about the domestic problems that gone on. She had her own place, her own apartment. And he would come in there, you know, behind closed doors. You never know if nobody don’t tell you.”

Ashanti’s cousin addressed this directly, posting that her cousin never told anyone what Kevin had been doing because she knew her family—and she was protecting him.

Someone who had known Kevin long before Ashanti also reached out after everything came to light. They identified themselves as having worked as a correctional officer during the period when Kevin was incarcerated between 2022 and 2023. They said Kevin treated prison “like a playground,” that he was very aggressive toward women, and when this person turned down his advances, he made their work shifts extremely difficult.

On April 16th, Kevin was charged. The next day, the charge was upgraded.

While Kevin was still running, Ashanti’s sister, Marie Peavey, posted publicly that Kevin had sent a threatening message to her brother Xavier—threatening their mother’s life. The message reportedly stated that if anything happened to his mother as a result of the manhunt and public attention, he would retaliate, warning that two people would go missing from their family.

“Why do we keep letting these people get out and walk around the streets with us?” a family member asked. “They keep letting these guys repeat and repeat and repeat.”

The U.S. Marshals closed in. Crime Stoppers of Houston put out a $5,000 reward for information leading to Kevin’s arrest.

On April 20th, 2026, the U.S. Marshals located Kevin Fox at an apartment in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. He was taken into custody and transported back to Harris County. His bond was denied.

“It’s a tragedy,” a source familiar with the case said. “But from our perspective, it was utterly preventable because we had multiple opportunities of keeping a career habitual violent felon behind bars, and we didn’t do it.”

In the days that followed, family members spoke publicly about the man they had welcomed into their home.

“He was acting like he was such a caring person,” Teresa said. “But you know what? He really deserves an Academy Award for his acting because he had all of us fooled.”

“We took him in, we fed him, gave him a car. Yeah. Everything,” Marie added. “And for him to just take her like that and the way that he took her was just like he had no feeling for her. Nothing.”

Teresa had a message for anyone listening: “If something is going on with your relationship, please let your mama, your daddy, your sister, your brother know. Because if we had any grip or any indication that something was going bad, we could have fixed it, and she would still be here right now.”

Her tears, she said, start as grief and turn to anger. “Anger because they can’t understand why someone would harm a woman who was eight months pregnant. That was your girlfriend. She loved you. You were supposed to love her back and take care of her. You were her child’s father.”

On April 23rd, 2026, the family held a balloon release at Chimney Rock Park at 7:00 p.m. The community came out. Family, friends, EquuSearch volunteers, and Houston police officers gathered to honor Ashanti and baby Jackson.

“Everybody told me not to go view my child’s body,” Teresa said. “But I carried her for nine months. I wanted to see my child’s body. I’m not going to get into details, but all I can say is my child suffered. And it was a horrific death.”

She looked directly at the camera. “Don’t let up. Keep sharing her story. I want her story to help someone who might be in that type of situation. Please tell someone what you’re going through. Even if the person threatened you and told you not to tell—please tell.”

Teresa had harsh words for the prosecutor and judge who allowed Kevin to walk free before. “After viewing my child’s body and the state that it was in, I really want the prosecutor that was over Kevin’s case before and the judge who hit that gavel and let him free—I want them to look at the picture of my child. She should not be in that state. He plead guilty. He got a sweetheart deal. He was let out. And now look at us. We’re right here when we should be celebrating the birth of my grandson. Here we are celebrating their life because they’re no longer here.”

She demanded that Harris County do right this time. “Do not fail my baby a second time. Do not let him walk. He does not deserve to be walking on this earth. He does not deserve a bond.”

“He gets to eat,” she said. “He doesn’t deserve nothing at all. Even hell is not good enough for him. The maximum penalty is not good enough for him. Him sitting in jail ain’t good enough for him. But this is what we got to deal with. I’m going to fight to the very end for Ashanti and baby Jackson.”

Looking back, Teresa wished Ashanti had spoken up. “We were super close. She was a mama’s girl. They called us the mother-daughter duo. I always told her, if anything is going on, please let me know. I can help. Don’t let the king fool you. I can help. I could have helped her out. But I believe that she was just trying to protect me because there’s no telling what he said to her.”

She wants Ashanti’s story to reach everyone. “Don’t be quiet. Ashanti was very quiet and stayed to herself. So we didn’t know too much. But even so—just speak out. That’s all we say. Speak out because we don’t want this to be your story too. This shouldn’t have never happened.”

Ashanti’s brother Xavier organized a GoFundMe to help the family cover expenses. On April 26th, 2026, Ashanti and baby Jackson were laid to rest at Forest Park Missouri City Funeral Home. Dozens of family and friends gathered to celebrate their lives.

A memorial wall displayed everything Ashanti loved: wrestling—CM Punk was her favorite—football, singing, her Bible, her beloved dogs, R&B and hip-hop, Marshall High School memorabilia.

“Everything,” Teresa said, looking at the wall. “It’s beyond what I could have even imagined. I’m speechless because I couldn’t have created this.”

Kevin Fox remains in Harris County Jail, held without bond, awaiting trial on two counts of capital homicide for Ashanti Allen and her unborn son, Jackson. His defense attorney declined to comment.

Teresa has stated she will attend every court hearing. She wants the maximum penalty. She wants the Harris County judicial system to do right by her daughter this time.

“I cry because I miss her. I laugh because I miss her little humor. And then my tears start turning to anger.”

“I will fight to the very end.”