Finally, a Name on Grave of Detroit Woman Whose Rape, Murder Were Forgotten

DETROIT, MI — Dantoya White wasn’t quite 16 when Michael Montgomery, now 31, abducted her as she walked home from a public library on Dec. 29, 2005. He raped and stabbed her about 40 times, then left her lifeless, mutilated body in a west-side alley where it lay, undiscovered until New Year’s Day 2006.

White’s unmarked and mostly forgotten grave in Westlawn Cemetery became a cruel metaphor for an investigation that went into the cold-case files and a rape kit that was abandoned along with thousands of others in a Detroit police storage unit.

White’s case was reopened after Montgomery’s October 2015 arrest for slashing a Detroit paramedic in the face, severely disfiguring her, and stabbing another paramedic as they responded to a situation involving Montgomery’s female companion. Both nearly died in the savage attack.

In custody, the story Montgomery’s violent past unraveled. DNA evidence from one of the thousands of untested rape kits — forgotten, too, shoved aside in a Detroit police storage unit until their discovery in 2009— linked Montgomery in White’s horrific last moments and death. His DNA sample also helped police solve two other cold cases involving kidnapping and rape.

Montgomery admitted what he did to White and the other two women.

“You didn’t just kill her,” the victim’s uncle, Lorenzo White, testified at Montgomery’s sentencing last month, “you took her soul.”

Another of her uncles, Emanuel White, told WDIV-TV after Montgomery’s arrest that his niece was “a good-hearted God’s child” who “didn’t deserve that.”

“Oh lord, he raped her,” Mary White, the teen’s grandmother, told WJBK-TV. “He stabbed her about what, 40 times? Something like that. Seems to me he did everything to her.”

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Montgomery was sentenced to 40 to 80 years in prison for White’s murder and rape, the two other kidnappings and rapes, and the attack on the two paramedics. He said he agreed to plead guilty to spare the victims’ and their families further agony.

Members of White’s family have said she didn’t get the justice she deserved. Not only was the sentence too soft, they said, police didn’t connect what seemed like obvious signs that a serial rapist and murderer was on the loose in the area where White was killed.

White and another victim were both abducted and raped in December 2005 just about a week apart. Both were walking in the vicinity of a branch of the Detroit Public Library on Joy Road. Mary White told WJBK that library patrons were never warned of the back-to-back rapes and White’s murder.

Police knew the following April that DNA samples in each case matched, but still didn’t alert anyone about a serial rapist. In May 2006, Montgomery kidnapped and raped a 15-year-old about five miles from Joy Road library branch. Her rape kit languished for seven years, and her case went cold as well.

“The reality is it didn't have to happen. I didn't have to be cut. This girl didn't need to be raped. This is 10 years,” Kelly Adams, the injured paramedic told WJBK. “Ten years this man has walked the streets of Detroit doing what he does and nobody has stopped him.”

White’s mother, Morennica Jefferson, told reporters after Montgomery’s sentencing that if she’d been the judge, her daughter’s killer would never see daylight again, "just like my daughter won’t see daylight.”

But there’s as happy an ending as a story like this can have.

Dantoya White’s grave is no longer forgotten, thanks to people who didn’t know her and don’t want to be known themselves, WJBK-TV reported.

A businessman who asked to remain anonymous paid for the upkeep of her grave in perpetuity, A family of stonemasons engraved an angel on a headstone to mark it, but refused payment. Gravediggers stood in the rain to set it, again at no charge.

Dantoya White may not have gotten all of the justice those who loved her said she deserved, but she’s no longer forgotten.

Photo via Shutterstock