The family of a single mom who disappeared after taking an Uber from an Indianapolis nightclub found her raped, shot, and murdered when they tracked her phone down to a wood behind her home.
Chanti Dixon, 30, vanished after getting into the rideshare outside the club where she worked on West 16th Street just after 3.30am on Sunday.
Her distraught relatives called police to the scene and handed the phone to officers who identified the Uber driver as Francisco Valadez, 29.
He initially claimed that his passenger had been attacked by an ‘armed Black man’ as she sat in his car. But he has been charged with murder after admitting that he shot her dead in a fury when she insulted his body as he raped her.
‘This is a family’s worst nightmare,’ Indianapolis Police Assistant Chief Catherine Cummings told a press conference on Wednesday. ‘We’re disgusted.’
The mom-of-two had only moved into her home on Earhart Street days earlier with children Dashun, 13, and Chianti, 10.
Police believe Valadez had driven her to the street before launching his murderous attack just yards from her front door.
They traced his BMW with an Indiana license plate to his home on Aristocrat Circle in the Far East Side of the city before knocking at his door on Tuesday morning.
He admitted picking up Dixon from the club but claimed that a passerby had tried to rob her at gunpoint after approaching his car.
‘He added that the suspect shot (Dixon) in the thigh and that she kicked herself out of his car and he fled the scene,’ police wrote in their report.
‘He also said that he had cleaned the blood out of his car.’
Other officers were speaking to Valadez’s mother who told them her son routinely carried a gun in his car.
Police arrested Valadez after a search of the car found the weapon and he agreed to being questioned.
‘Mr Valadez told two different stories as to what happened with Ms Dixon,’ police wrote.
Eventually he admitted raping Valadez and shooting her in the head when she scorned her rapist’s 5ft 6ins, 215-pound body.
He dragged her dead body out of the car and over a concrete barrier, and into some undergrowth beside a school bus stop.
Then he tried to rape her again.
‘I keep waiting for her to walk through that door, but I know she won’t,’ her mother Rise Dixon told WRTV.
‘Don’t let what happened to her diminish what she put out in the world.
‘She’d always be like, ‘Ma, you my best friend’ and I’m like, ‘Girl, yeah I know and you’re my best friend’.
‘You could not miss her presence because she was going to let you know when he came through the door. She’d yell, ‘Hey y’all, hey y’all,’ and she made sure that her kids, her nieces, her nephews, her sisters and brother, they knew she loved them.
‘She was so selfless. So selfless.’
‘This is a family that’s been ripped apart,’ said Indianapolis PD chief Chris Bailey as he announced that Valadez had been charged with murder.
‘This woman is gone from the world unnecessarily by an evil act, and I’m glad that we were able to find this individual as quickly as we did so that he didn’t have an opportunity to perpetuate violence further in our community.’
The family has set up a Gofundme appeal for Dixon’s orphaned children and Bailey said more charges would likely follow before Valadez’s first court appearance on Thursday.
‘No one deserves to be treated this way in our community and I am so sorry to her family that we’re here today,’ he added.
Police are asking any other victims of Valadez to come forward, and a spokesman for Uber said their ‘hearts break for Ms Dixon’s family and loved ones in the midst of this tragedy’.
‘The details of this act of violence are atrocious and we will assist Indianapolis police however we can as they continue to investigate,’ the company added.
‘One thing about Chanti, she was a good person,’ her cousin Eric Young told Indystar.com. She was always the life of the party and, I’m telling you, she was a mother first.
‘If it wasn’t going to be her, it would have been someone else,’ he added.
‘I just want justice. I want justice for her and I want justice for our family. I really want justice for her son.’