CHARLES COUNTY, Md. — It's like losing her son all over again. That's how Latashia Lee describes the last two weeks, as she desperately tries to find whoever purchased her storage unit in Charles County with all of her son Jeremiah's belongings inside it.
Jeremiah would've been 12 this year. He passed away when he was just two months old.
"I have - or I had - baby boxes for all the kids. So it has like their wristbands that they came home with, their umbilical cord when it fell off, things like that, in it. But that's all I had left of him," Lee said.
A family emergency brought her to Utah, and she left a lot of her things in storage in La Plata. After losing her job, she fell behind on payments. The unit was auctioned off.
"They contacted me that day and I had like two hours to come up with the money to save it, and I just couldn't," Lee said.
She says legally, the company couldn't tell her who purchased the unit. She's been scouring Facebook marketplace and online yard sale sites, searching for what she has left of her son.
"And his box is very distinct. It's a red wing shoebox that I packed his stuff in. It literally says 'Jeremiah's Things' on it," Lee said.
She made a plea for help on TikTok, hoping to somehow connect with whoever might have the box.
Lee found comfort in the comments from people offering to share the posts as widely as they could, hoping to help.
"Especially when people were like 'it made it to Waldorf, it made it to Southern Maryland, made it to Baltimore. It made me feel a lot better that it was getting to the places it needed to get to," Lee said. "I think it's just the fact that people can't fathom losing a child already. But then to lose the last memories or anything you have of them is equally as devastating because it feels like he's dying all over again to me."
She's offering a reward for the return of Jeremiah's things.
“For anything that’s not of value to them that they can’t monetize off of, I do have a reward already set to the side for way more than they paid for the unit. So I’m willing to pay for those items back. And there’s no hard feelings. It wasn’t their fault," Lee said.
To reach Lee through her TikTok account, click here.
