A missing Florida woman was found dead in her estranged husband’s storage unit, authorities said.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook on Saturday that Shakeira Yvonne Rucker, 37, was discovered dead in a storage unit at the Self Storage on Wiggins Road in Apopka. Rucker’s case is being looked into by the sheriff’s office as a possible homicide.
“This is not the update we wanted to be giving you all today,” Sheriff John Mina said at a news conference Sunday, adding that the story has had a lot of “twists and turns” over the last week and covered many jurisdictions.
Authorities had just finished searching for Rucker in an area near Bob White Airfield in Mount Dora on Saturday when they got a 911 call from someone at the Self Storage reporting “a smell emanating from one of the units,” Mina said.
Orange County sheriff’s deputies found Rucker dead in the unit from apparent gunshot wounds, Mina said. He said a full autopsy is underway.
Officials said the storage unit belonged to her estranged husband, Cory Hill, the prime suspect, and that he has not been cooperative in the investigation.
Rucker was killed at the storage unit, Mina said. No motive was announced.
“He is the suspect. We are not looking for anyone else. He will be charged with the murder eventually in this case,” Mina said.
An inquiry for comment was not immediately answered by Hill’s public defender’s office.
According to Mina, Hill was alleged to have shot at his “girlfriend and family” on November 12 and is currently being held at the Orange County Jail on four counts of attempted homicide. Records from the Orange County jail show that he was booked on November 13.
In that instance, according to WESH of Orlando, Hill was shooting at a former girlfriend and her family. A plea for clarification on Sunday night was not immediately answered by the sheriff’s office.
Rucker, who WESH reported was a mother of four, was first reported missing after her family said they last saw her on Nov. 11, Winter Springs police said on Facebook. Police said that she was last seen leaving her Winter Springs home that day and that her family believed she had been with Hill.
“It’s not the outcome we expected, but there’s a little bit of closure for Shakeira’s family,” Winter Springs Police Chief Matthew Tracht said Sunday.
Tracht said the team worked 16- to 18-hour days to find Rucker and worked across four counties: Orange, Seminole, Polk and Lake. It also got help from Mount Dora police, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the FBI, he said.
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