Dorie Starkey is aware of the speculation that communication from Samantha Fleming over the last month may have come from the woman who’s alleged to have had a role in her death.
Fleming’s family told Starkey they were convinced social media posts left by Fleming didn’t “sound” like her, she said. But Starkey, who said she was one of Fleming’s oldest friends, isn’t so sure it wasn’t Fleming she heard from in a text message April 9.
Starkey, 25, said she found out about Fleming’s disappearance April 8. She immediately texted her friend in a panic, she said.
A text from a different phone number came. The person on the other end said they couldn’t get into their Facebook messages was the reason she didn’t respond privately, Starkey said.
“I don’t understand. The texts said she was safe,” Starkey said from her Cleveland home. “She told me that she had taken Serenity to see her dad and that she knew it was probably a bad mistake, but she didn’t want Serenity to grow up not knowing her father.”
Fleming’s body was found Friday afternoon at a home in the 1900 block of Cleveland Street in Gary. A 36-year-old Gary resident, Geraldine Jones, has been charged in Madison County, in connection with her death. Fleming was living in Anderson with her boyfriend when Jones allegedly abducted her and her newborn infant earlier this month.
But the tone of the texts rang true to Starkey. Inseparable in high school, they had a way of talking that only the two of them understood, she said.
“If I had something bad going on, I would always say to her, ‘I have to tell you something,’ and she would always say, ‘What’s wrong?'” Starkey said. “I knew to say that because I wanted her to say something only she and I would know. And whoever it was sending the texts said, ‘What’s wrong?’
“You couldn’t tell me it wasn’t her.”
Starkey said she stopped hearing from Fleming after April 9. Then she got the news that her friend had been killed.
“It’s … I’m still lost,” Starkey said. “She had way too many friends, a lot of people just everywhere.”
But she was always cautious, often yelling at Starkey for hitching rides to work when she didn’t have a ride, she said.
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“I would tell her I’d never get into a car if I’d gotten a weird vibe from someone, but she would never get into a car with a stranger, especially with one of her kids. She had to have known this woman from somewhere…”
As Lake Station Edison High School’s yearbook adviser, English Teacher Eluides Pagan gets to know more students than he could ever remember. But he remembered Fleming as always having a smile on her face.
“I really wanted to hope she didn’t suffer, but after learning the details in yesterday’s articles, it just made it worse, he said. “I am just thankful that her baby is OK.”
Since Fleming has been out of school for a few years, many of Pagan’s students didn’t know her personally. Many, however, were rattled that such a thing could happen to anyone, let alone one of their own.
“I keep telling my kids that as horrible as this world can be, we have to open our eyes and try to see the beauty that is there,” he said.
Starkey said she’s waiting to hear when Fleming’s funeral services will be so she can come in. For her, it’s a necessity.
“We were all planning to get together in August so I could meet her boyfriend and she could meet my girlfriend,” Starkey said, holding back tears. “Until I see her in that coffin, I’m not going to believe she’s gone.”
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter.