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Fifteen-year-old Dominique Allen had already dealt with some challenges in her young life. She’d lost her mother to Crohn’s disease, and two friends to violence. In spite of those odds, Allen had perservered, asking a guidance counselor at school for help in navigating her educational process so that she would be certain to graduate. She’d become involved in a anti-violence program.

But sadly, someone didn’t allow Allen to reach her full potential. Her strangled and burned body was found in the backyard of a home not far from where she’d been last seen outside her sister’s home.

USA Today reports:

As school began in August at Ben Davis Ninth Grade Center, faculty noticed a girl who was pretty but whose eyes often were hidden beneath her hair and whose head was downcast. She was a reluctant participant in class. Almost immediately, she was failing algebra.

Then, Dominique did something that’s hard for many 15-year-olds to do. She reached out for help. She told guidance counselor Anita Swaner-Templeton that she knew how important it was to get off to a good start in high school, but she needed a guide. Pointedly, she asked the counselor: “Will you be my mom at school for me?”

Swaner-Templeton agreed. She began seeing Dominique each day. She talked to her teachers, checked up on her work and supplied Dominique with what she seemed to appreciate most — hugs. Soon, the girl with the troubled backstory had a spring in her step. With tutoring, her algebra was improving. She was beginning to hold her head high.

Then, barely a month into the school year, Dominique was dead.

Police believe she was abducted from the sidewalk in front of her sister’s home early on the morning of Aug. 31. Her badly burned remains were found the same day, a mile away. She’d been strangled and then burned, most likely to destroy DNA evidence.

The brazen abduction left the Allen family devastated and grappling for answers. Her death also brought pain to people, such as Swaner-Templeton whose lives she touched. And the burning of the girl’s body left people who never knew Dominique appalled by such a desecration and insistent that the culprit be brought to justice.

Almost two months later, there’s no such relief in sight. Police have no witnesses and no suspects in what appears to be a random killing. That’s left them, along with family and community leaders, convinced someone with vital information simply hasn’t come forward.

“We’re jeopardizing the community by keeping this person out there,” said one of Dominique’s sisters,Shenika Poindexter. “Somebody knows something.”

Read the entire story here.

If you have any information about this crime, please call The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police at 317.327.3811 or share via your social networks to help spread information to someone who might. 

Detective Marcus Kennedy is leading the investigation into Allen’s murder. 

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