Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Leila Cavett’s mom fears missing woman is dead
Tina Kirby has accepted that her missing daughter, Leila Cavett, is dead. The FBI told her as much. But it became painfully real when they asked her for a DNA sample.
Investigators needed Kirby’s DNA to analyze apparent blood found on shovels they discovered while investigating her daughter’s disappearance a month ago, after her 2-year-old son was found wandering alone in a parking lot in Miramar.
“Is my daughter coming back?” Kirby asked an FBI agent. She recalls the dreadful response: “No.”
“I don’t want my daughter to be dead,” Kirby told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Thursday, her first extensive interview since her daughter vanished. “But I cannot live the rest of my life in denial either.”
The distraught Alabama woman now sits in a South Florida hotel room desperately hoping a man who professes to be both a witch and god breaks his silence from his jail cell and directs the FBI to her daughter’s body. If given the chance, she’d beg the jailed man to tell her where Cavett is. “Tell me where my baby is! Please,” Kirby cried.
Shannon Ryan is a 38-year-old selfprofessed witch who was arrested in Cavett’s disappearance. He has said online that Cavett traveled to South Florida to be his new apprentice in late July and he was going to buy her truck from her. He admitted spending the day with her when she arrived in South Florida but denies having anything to do with her disappearance.
An FBI agent testified in court Friday that investigators recovered written conversations on Ryan’s phone,
“I think my daughter sacrificed herself to save the baby.” —Tina Kirby on her missing daughter, Leila Cavett
revealing exchanges between Cavett and Ryan about her becoming an apprentice, though they found nothing indicating she was going to sell her truck. Cavett’s phone has never been recovered.
Ryan was the man who discarded Kamdyn at the apartment complex, just like he discarded other evidence, a federal prosecutor said in court Friday.
To hear her daughter may have been drawn to witchcraft stuns Kirby.
“I know we are devout Christians,” Kirby said. “I cannot imagine this in a million years. I know that. I know that for a fact that my daughter loves Jesus. She would never willingly be involved in any of that. I believe that in my spirit.”
The last time Cavett’s mom spoke to her daughter, she asked her to leave her home, she said. Cavett had been quarreling with a lot people and the drama had become too much for Kirby. That was nine months ago. But when she heard her daughter vanished, and her son was found wandering in Miramar, she knew something horrible happened.
“She wouldn’t leave her son that long,” Kirby said. “I believe no matter that my daughter would never have been away from her son that long. I think my daughter sacrificed herself to save the baby.”
Much of the country was introduced to the wide-eyed, 21-year-old Cavett in late July after her toddler, Kamdyn Arnold — clad in only diaper and black Tshirt — ended up at an apartment complex.
When images of the lost little boy made their way to Alabama, the mystery of how he got to South Florida deepened: Where could Cavett be? Why was this young mom, who oftentimes went in and out of people’s lives and homes, now in Florida after spending the last several months living in Georgia?
Clues in the case
The investigation gained steam weeks later when Ryan turned to social media claiming to have put a hex on Cavett.
Ryan touts himself as a spiritual guru, providing health, wellness and balance. His Facebook page, the Magnetic Kundalini, has more than 37,000 followers. But his actions before his arrest belie any sense of calmness and well-being.
In a 51-minute video posted on YouTube, he is agitated. He rocks back and forth. He punctuates his words — words that tell a story about Cavett showing up on his doorstep in rural Alabama on January 2019, dirty with baby in tow.
He claims he and his then-apprentice cared for her and in return Cavett robbed them and left without a goodbye.
Ryan was arrested Aug. 15 in Cavett’s case. Days later, the charge of lying to authorities was upgraded to kidnapping. The case is now going to be presented to a federal grand jury. Should the grand jury indict Ryan, he faces the prospect of life in prison and at a minimum 20 years behind bars if found guilty, federal prosecutor Jodi Anton said in a court hearing Friday.
Anton also indicated in court that there is no proof that Cavett is still alive as there has been no traces of any activity on social media, no credit cards and bank card transactions and no surveillance video — things that can trace her location since July 25.
The gold Lexus Ryan had been driving was caught on surveillance video at the gate of the apartment complex where Kamdyn was found. Special Agent Samuel Band said in court Friday that Ryan admitted it was his car, but said he pulled up to the complex to check on a tire.
Surveillance does not show Kamdyn being left at the complex, Band said when questioned by Ryan’s federal public defender, Jan Christopher Smith.
Cellphone tower records do place the Lexus near the apartment at about the time that Kamdyn was found near the gate of the complex.
Federal agents can place Cavett at a RaceTrac gas station in Hollywood twice on July 25. Her truck was found two days later at a neighboring Walmart. Agents secretively kept an eye on the truck and say Ryan came up to it and he had the keys, court records show.
Federal records say Ryan on July 26 attempted to sell the old white pickup Cavett drove down in. They also can place Ryan at a Walmart purchasing 39-gallon, extra-large garbage bags, two boxes of carpet odor eliminator and advanced-strength duct tape earlier.
On Aug. 15, a federal search warrant was executed on Ryan’s Lexus. Court records say agents found a half-empty container of all-purpose cleaner with bleach, numerous black trash bags and a white powdery substance under the front seat.
An employee at the gas station told federal investigators Ryan was seen using the RaceTrac dumpster. Another employee remembered seeing children’s toys and women’s clothing inside the dumpster on July 26, records say. When questioned in court Friday, Band, the special FBI agent, said there are images of Ryan dumping large and small items from the truck.
The employee, according to court records, remembered seeing a distinctive pair of floral pants like those that Cavett was seen wearing on surveillance video that was released by the FBI. Law enforcement say they recovered surveillance video that puts Ryan at the dumpster.
The cellphone Ryan was using had been used to research when commercial garbage is picked up in Hollywood. Another search, also on July 26, asked, “Does bleach and alcohol make chloroform.” Chloroform tends to incapacitate people. Records say authorities found shovels with red droplets on them in the bed of Cavett’s truck. In court the FBI said what appeared to be blood was also found on the seats of Cavett’s truck and the Lexus.
During a 55 minute hearing Friday, the federal prosecutor called Ryan a wondering witch who just a year ago got off parole after being sentenced to 15 years in an Alabama prison for burglary. She said he should be kept in jail as the case plays out. U.S. Magistrate Judge Lurana Snow agreed to that for the time being, saying the government had strong circumstantial evidence.
Staying on the move
Kirby is just 43, although her voice, strained by all the crying and exhaustion, could be pegged for much older. She said feels much older as well. “One day I’m going to die and go to heaven and then I’ll get a break.”
Cavett initially moved out of the home in her mid-teens and she has always been pretty resilient, her mom says.
For a time, she had her own place in public housing. Kirby said last November, about the time Cavett got arrested for a possession of drugs charge — drugs she claimed a hitchhiker left in her car — the two of them had been talking about Cavett moving to Ohio to live with a close friend of Kirby’s.
This, would be a chance to start over, make new friends, get away from old habits. But she didn’t expect her daughter to pack up and leave without saying goodbye, not long after Kirby told her to leave the home because of all the quarreling.
Cavett made it to Ohio but it didn’t work out with the friend so she stayed at a homeless shelter, until connecting with her father, who lives in the state.
Kirby said she’d look at her daughter’s Facebook page trying to keep tabs on her daughter. Then she said she was elated to learned her daughter was in Dawsonville, Georgia, living with Kirby’s mother.
Though Kirby said she is also not on speaking terms with her mother, she knew her daughter would be cared for. And so in April when Kamdyn’s second birthday was approaching, Kirby said she put together a care package of Leila’s favorite candy — Mango-flavored Now and Later candy — some of her treasured clothes that she left behind in November, masks to help fight off COVID-19 and some gifts for Kamdyn.
Kirby said she asked her brother, Bubba Matthews, who lives in Georgia, to check in on her daughter. He did, she said, many times.
And then, like so many other times, Cavett stopped living with her grandmother.
Robin McPherson Jenkins told the South Florida Sun Sentinel she was not interested in talking about what happened. Kirby and her mother still aren’t talking even though Cavett is presumed dead in Kirby’s mind.
Now Kirby is in a tug-of-war with her other children. They want her back in Alabama and they desperately hold on to the belief that their sister, the second oldest in the line of six, is still alive. “My one daughter said, ‘If you just come home, she will too.‘”
Kirby doesn’t know how long she’ll stay in Florida, living off a small and dwindling GoFundMe account. She said she’ll know in her heart when it is time to leave. She says right now though, she needs answers for daughter, for her own sanity.
“I just want my daughter to know I didn’t abandon her and I am not going anywhere,” she said sobbing. “I want to be able to look at my grandson and say and tell him I did everything I could.
“I want him to know his momma loved him and more than likely she gave her life to make sure he was safe. That’s what I believed happened. I believe my daughter may have traded her life for my grandson. And I want him to know.”