In the summer of 2009, Rhia Almeida stood about 4 feet tall. On her tiptoes, she reached her mom’s chest, and when she leaned in for hugs her chocolate brown hair danced over her shoulders.

Rhia loved playing outside and was especially fond of the old tire swing hanging from a tree outside her family’s new home in Ajo, an unincorporated community near the borders of México and the Tohono O’odham Nation. They’d just moved to the area several months earlier from Ghaka, a small village on their ancestral homelands.

Rhia was mostly a tomboy who usually turned up her nose to conventionally girly things. It wasn’t surprising considering she was her family’s only girl at the time, sandwiched between three brothers, Jesse, Julian and Roman.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T).

“I remember one Christmas, we already knew she didn’t want girl toys, but we were like maybe if we just get them for her she’ll play with them,” her mom, Elayne Gregg, says, smiling for a moment at the memory. “She was mad. She would open up the wrapping, see pink and she would throw it.”

Still, Elayne wanted girl time with her daughter, whose interest in that kind of thing was just beginning to show. So when Rhia asked one random day to dye her hair with blonde streaks, her mom seized the opportunity.

“We made an appointment that day because I’m like, this is my little girl coming out,” Elayne says, her eyes brightening as she sits at her family’s dining room table years later.

The image of those blonde streaks is seared into Elayne’s mind. The way they glowed like fireflies in the late afternoon sun on June 18, 2009, as Rhia walked across Solana Avenue with her brother’s blue and red Huffy bicycle. She was going to visit a friend who lived about two blocks away.

Rhia stopped on the other side of the street to throw her leg over the bike seat. Elayne watched her little girl go, standing upright and pushing hard at the pedals toward a dirt lot that runs into a wash.

And just before riding out of sight, Rhia waved goodbye to her mom for the last time.

Something was wrong

Ajo was once a thriving copper mining town. At its peak in 1960, it had more than 7,000 residents, making it one of Pima County’s largest communities outside of Tucson at the time, according to the United States Census Bureau.

Along with the closure of its mine in 1985, however, went many of Ajo’s residents. Just five years later, the rural desert town’s population dwindled to nearly 3,000 people, where it’s hovered since, U.S. Census data shows.

Now it’s one of those places most people pass through along Highway 85 to get where they’re going, like Rocky Point. But for many of the town’s neighbors on the Tohono O’odham Nation, it’s one of the closest communities to buy groceries or grab a quick bite to eat, says Elayne, who is Tohono O’odham, Akimel O’odham and Inupiaq.

Rhia’s family moved to Ajo just before her 7th birthday in September 2008. It was a relatively quiet town known for its arts and history. Elayne says she didn’t get the sense it was dangerous, and that it seemed like the kind of place where everyone knew everyone.

“We were happy to be there,” Elayne says. “We felt safe. We lived on the main drag and our kids were freely playing outside. We didn’t have a feeling of fear, I don’t think I ever felt that.”

Still, Rhia never went to her 9-year-old friend’s home alone. Her two slightly older brothers, who were also friends with the neighbor kid, always tagged along. But that hot summer day, Rhia was eager to play outside, so she begged and begged until her mom gave in. 

“I was really feeling the pressure from her,” Elayne says, her fingers laced together as she spoke. It was her second day in a row caring for her four kids alone – including Rhia’s 1-year-old brother – plus her nephew.

Her husband and Rhia’s stepdad, Antonio Ortiz was halfway through his work week with Ajo Ambulance, which required him to stay at a distant station for days at a time. Antonio is also Tohono O’odham.

“This scene kept playing in my head over and over, it was really strong … and I couldn’t shake it,” Elayne says. “Something was telling me that she was gone. I just had this feeling.”

To help calm her growing fear, she sent Rhia’s two older brothers to check on her. One came back with the bike, saying he found it in their friend’s backyard. He also told his mom their friend’s older brother answered the front door and said the kid had gone to Disneyland with their grandparents.

They looked for Rhia for more than an hour, taking turns going to and from their friend’s house. On the last trip, Elayne noticed it’d taken one of her sons a bit longer to come home.

“He came back a different way … and he was like, the cops showed up,” she says. “He said, ‘I seen a body. I seen a little girl.’”

“‘What was she wearing?’” Elayne remembers asking her son. Her voice quavers when she says Rhia’s brother described the little girl’s clothes.

“That’s what Rhia was wearing,” she says.

‘He hurt my baby’

When Rhia arrived at her friend’s house at about 5 p.m., his 19-year-old brother Loretto Kyle Alegria, Jr. was home alone.

He raped and murdered Rhia at the home, according to incident reports from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Alegria then hid her body in the same desert wash Rhia had crossed moments before.

She was found at about 7 p.m. by two young girls riding their bikes nearby, the reports said. They quickly told an adult, who then called local law enforcement. Within minutes, deputies from the sheriff’s department rushed to the area. So did Elayne.

“It was right down our road so I ran over there,” she says. “We knew all the Ajo Ambulance people and I remember seeing one of our friends walking up out of that wash area and just shaking his head.”

Elayne says she told the deputies who stopped her from getting close, “I know that’s my daughter.”

“I remember looking back towards my house and all four boys were standing at the corner of that busy street … and there was this overwhelming, like, blanket,” she says. “It just shut everything down. That’s when I felt my fire shut down.”

“I got home and I don’t even remember screaming but I remember hearing this animal-like sound coming out loud, and it was me,” she says, crying and staring out the window across from her family’s dinner table.

Alegria was identified as a suspect early in the investigation because Rhia had gone to visit his younger sibling, and their home was about “two to three houses down” from where she was found, according to the reports.

The sheriff’s department obtained a warrant to search Alegria’s home in the early hours of June 19. The reports said they collected evidence over the next couple days, including items hidden at an abandoned home in the area.

Alegria was booked that same morning and indicted by a grand jury a short time later on charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual conduct with a minor, according to Pima County Superior Court records. He initially denied having any involvement with Rhia’s death.

But at one point in 2011, Alegria considered pleading guilty, which would have avoided a lengthy trial and taken the death penalty he faced off the table. He ultimately rejected the plea, stating in a court hearing about the matter, “I don’t deserve to live. I deserve the max,” according to an article from the Arizona Daily Star.

Over the next couple of years, Alegria underwent several competency hearings but was eventually deemed fit to stand trial, court records available online show. His attorney later said at the trial that Alegria was guilty for Rhia’s death but argued “he was insane at the time,” the Daily Star reported.

Four years after Rhia waved goodbye to her mom, Alegria was convicted in October 2013 for all the charges he faced, court records show. A jury ultimately decided against the death penalty and instead sentenced Alegria to spend his natural life in prison for Rhia’s murder.

“She was taken in the most horrific way,” Elayne says through tears. “He hurt my baby.”

“I couldn’t look at her picture for years … I just felt this guilt,” she says. “It was just too much to bear. It was too much to comprehend what she went through, what her little body had to endure.”

A growing movement

Rhia’s family lived in Ajo for another nine years after she passed. Elayne says the community was supportive, but after a while it started to feel like a black cloud loomed over their family. For a long time, she worried, “If I moved, I was leaving her.”

“That couldn’t have been farther from the truth,” Elayne says. “There was just nothing more for me over there (in Ajo). There was no growth.”

The family moved to Coolidge in 2018. That same year, Elayne volunteered for the first time with Indivisible Tohono, a grassroots community organization that formed two years earlier to address state and federal legislation impacting the Tohono O’odham Nation and its citizens.

Elayne never really considered herself to be a political person. But something about the group drew her in. Now, she knows it was destined.

She had signed up to drive one of several vanloads of women from the Tohono O’odham Nation to a Women’s March in Phoenix. There, among thousands of people, she heard the term for the first time: MMIW.

“I didn’t know what it stood for and I remember one of the girls was like, ‘What does that mean?’ and I’m like, ‘I have no idea,’” Elayne says with a small laugh, thinking about how much she’s learned since. “So we looked it up and it said Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.”

The movement now has many similar names and acronyms — including Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and Transgender People, also known as MMIWG2T — to be more inclusive of any Indigenous person who faces this injustice.

The effort began in Canada to bring awareness to the injustice of Indigenous women going missing and being murdered at disproportionate rates. While the movement was just gaining traction in the U.S. by the time Elayne heard about it, violence against Indigenous women existed for decades before it was ever given a name or more widely acknowledged.

On some Tribal Nations, Indigenous women were murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average, according to a U.S. Department of Justice statement published in 2012 and updated in 2017. More than four in five Indigenous women also experienced violence in their lifetime, according to a 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice. 

Arizona, specifically, was discovered to have the third highest number of Indigenous women and girls going missing or being murdered in the country, according to a 2017 study by the Urban Indian Health Institute. A 2020 legislative study also found that 160 Indigenous women and girls were murdered in Arizona between 1976 and 2018 – a total that steadily increased in those 40 years.

Elayne may not have known the details about the growing movement at that Phoenix Women’s March six years ago but as a mother she knew. She knew what happened to her little girl.

“I remember standing with the crowd, surrounding a speaker who was talking about her loved one that had gone missing,” she says, stopping for a long pause. “And whose body was later found.”

“I remember feeling this fire reignite inside of me that had dimmed out when Rhia was gone,” she says. “I was just like, wow, I really felt like I was supposed to be there for a reason.”

When the group later met at a Peter Piper Pizza, Elayne shared her story with some of the members of Indivisible Tohono, including one of its co-founders, April Ignacio. “I just word vomited, I couldn’t stop,” Elayne says of finding support from her Indigenous community.

Unknown to Elayne at the time, April had been compiling data and documenting stories about Tohono O’odham women and girls who were murdered or had gone missing. Ignacio said her research began unintentionally and really only picked up steam when the community started referring her from one family to another.

Within a year and a half, April had interviewed about 40 people.

“The goal was just to provide education to my community about MMIW and then it became something else,” she said before noting that it was likely one of the first data collection efforts about the injustice in Arizona.

“I think we’ve been very fortunate in how much support there is in the community because they see the value,” April added. “The key part of the work is that their memory is sustained in how they lived and not how they died.”

The injustice of Indigenous women being murdered or going missing has since become a focal point for Indivisible Tohono. Its efforts over the years helped spur government action, beginning with the state’s creation of a study committee in 2019 to officially look into the issue for the first time.

The committee was renewed once more and expanded to include Indigenous men before disbanding. Then in 2023, Gov. Katie Hobbs established the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Task Force.

The city of Tucson and Pima County soon followed suit by joining forces to create a regional task force of its own. April is appointed to both.

Telling her own story

Families and long-time advocates at the heart of this injustice often say the stories of Indigenous people who are missing or have been murdered haven’t been given the attention they deserve — especially in the news.

Dozens of articles were written about what happened to Rhia, making her name known today within the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, or MMIWG, movement in Arizona. Still, a majority of the stories heavily focused on Alegria – what he did and updates on his trial.

Apart from an obituary in the Ajo Copper News, almost none of the stories described Rhia’s life or included quotes from her family.

Elayne says she remembers feeling bombarded by reporters and their cameras. Sometimes to the point that her friends and family would stand guard outside their home.

“I didn’t want to talk about her. I didn’t want anyone else talking about her. I just wanted to be left alone,” she remembers.

But since that day in Phoenix with Indivisible Tohono, Elayne has shared her daughter’s story in her own way. She self-penned an article for Ms. Magazine in 2019 to bring attention to Indigenous women and girls who are missing or were murdered.

She says sharing has helped her heal. More than anything, she wants Rhia remembered for the spirited 7-year-old girl she was and for how much her family loved her. She’s not just a name in news stories about the man who took her life.

June will mark 15 years since Rhia’s life was taken. Years that have been filled with heartbreak and hardship for her loved ones. Years that her mom now associates with lyrics from Rhia’s favorite Hannah Montana song: “There’s always gonna be another mountain. I’m always gonna wanna make it move.”

“It’s still kind of hard to listen to,” Elayne says. “But the message behind it — I really listen to the words. How to move mountains.”

Rhia’s family continues to heal. They’ve grown their family by two more daughters, Beya and Siku. Antonio also publicly opened up about Rhia for the first time last October during a couple of community panels that centered the experiences of MMIWG survivors who are men.

“I don’t know how to talk about any of this, it’s all new,” he said into a mic while facing an audience of more than 30 people. “I don’t know how to talk about her without having to think about the way she was taken from us.”

But Antonio said he remembers Rhia every day. Like the time she did a spinning heel kick while play fighting with her brothers when they stayed at a hotel in Tucson. And when she fearlessly picked up frogs that would gather in an outdoor shower they used to have.

“It’s really hard to remember the good things about her,” he said, choking back tears.

Antonio changed careers a few years after Rhia’s passing and now works as a sergeant for the Tohono O’odham Police Department.

“I get to help people and find closure through the work that I do,” he said during one of the panels. He said he sometimes oversees domestic violence and homicide cases.

Elayne also wants to channel her pain into helping others. She’s taking social work classes at Tohono O’odham Community College and Central Arizona College in the hopes of one day moving back to the Nation to support families through their own trauma.

“I feel like her death has really just laid out our life’s paths,” she says.

A few months before Rhia’s life was taken, Antonio bought Elayne her first digital camera. And Rhia loved it. She became the center of many of those family photos that are now spread throughout their home in Coolidge.

Looking back, Elayne thinks there were other forces at work to help her preserve her daughter’s memory in their final months together. She often wonders what Rhia would’ve been like today.

Maybe she would’ve grown out her chocolate brown hair with blonde streaks, the same ones you can clearly make out in Elayne’s photos now. Or perhaps her little girl would have grown to dye her hair all kinds of colors, maybe even that same pink Rhia despised so much as a kid.

Elayne is sure of one thing — her daughter wouldn’t have been much different from who she was at 7 years old. Beautiful and strong.

“She was just a walking lightbulb, she glowed all the time,” she says.