Memorial to Joni Rockingham / 300 block of 34th Street NE DC

From a DC police report: Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Branch are investigating a fatal stabbing that occurred in the 300 block of 34th Street NE, Washington DC, on Tuesday, December 12, 2017. At approximately 8:36 am, members of the Sixth District responded to the listed location for the report of an unconscious female. Upon arrival on the scene, members located an unconscious and unresponsive adult female. DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services found that the victim displayed no signs consistent with life. The cause of death was found to be multiple stab wounds and the manner of death was ruled a homicide. The decedent has been identified as Joni S. Rockingham, 53, of Northeast, DC. She had been reported missing on November 24, 2017, and was the subject of an active Youth and Family Services Division missing persons case. 

From WUSA-9: Police found a woman's body in an alley in Northeast DC. They suspect it's Joni Sharette Rockingham, 53, a mother of three grown children, and they think she was murdered.
It was the outcome friends and family feared the most. Rockingham walked out of her mom's house the day before Thanksgiving without her purse and disappeared.
   
Her friends and family searched and plastered missing posters her everywhere they could.
“She was a person make you laugh all the time, clown all the time,” said her sister, Trina Rockingham.
Almost three weeks after she disappeared, a neighbor spotted a woman's body next to a garbage can behind an abandoned home on 34th St. Neighbors say they searched the alley and the driveway repeatedly. They say she was not here up until now. ‘We think somebody dumped her, definitely, because she was not laying (there), said Rockingham’s friend April King.
“I just believe she put up a struggle. And I'm hoping and believing that some DNA is going to show up somewhere,” said a neighbor, Connie Dickens.
Her sister says it’s going to be a horrible Christmas. “That’s a sick person,” she said of the killer. “Because who is going to hold someone that long? Who does that?”