DUVAL COUNTY, Fla. — Eighteen months after her daughter’s disappearance, a local mother is getting some closure.
Brittany Palmer was last seen in August 2020, and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office began their investigation into her disappearance the following month.
RELATED: ‘Where is Brittany?’: Mother desperate for answers after daughter disappears
Now, Palmer’s mother, Ms. Vontria Mobley, wants to know how her remains ended up in a local cemetery.
Action News Jax’s Courtney Cole spoke to Brittany’s mother about how long ago her daughter’s body was found and the question she still has for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
“I’ll never forget her smile, her laugh, just her being around … because I felt after her accident, God wanted her to be here,” Mobley said, trying her best to hold back tears as she spoke to Cole about her daughter.
RELATED: Where is Brittany? Family desperate for answers after daughter disappeared a year ago
Mobley said she never stopped looking for her.
“About a couple of weeks ago, I had a young lady reach out to me on messenger, about a ‘Jane Doe’ that was found,” Mobley explained.
Mobley said the woman who reached out was an advocate with a missing and unidentified persons organization.
The woman told Mobley she reached out to JSO for many months about this, but never got a response.
After no response from the sheriff’s office, Mobley said the advocate reached out to her directly.
STORY: Girl missing since 2019 found alive
Mobley said she didn’t want to believe it at first, but the woman was persistent and even sent her a sketch to compare to a picture of Brittany.
“The body was found October 8, 2020, about a month-and-a-half after she went missing,” Mobley said.
Brittany’s mother told Cole her daughter’s remains were found at a cemetery, right off Edgewood Avenue and Moncrief Road. Now she’s working with JSO to learn exactly where in the cemetery her daughter’s remains were found.
“Who did this to my baby? I want to know who did it, who placed her there; what was your motive? Somebody put her there, she didn’t just wind up there,” Mobley questioned.
STORY: Middleburg man arrested on DUI charges in 2021 crash that killed 2 people in Jacksonville
Brittany’s mother said Monday that a JSO detective told her the remains were positively identified as Brittany.
“I was distraught. I was hurt, because my DNA had been on file since the very beginning of this case. And for you to find remains and not put it through the database to find out who those remains belong to … if they wasn’t Brittany, anybody else that it could have been, too…and for it to take this long, it was very devastating to me,” said Mobley.
Now she’s waiting on an autopsy to learn how she died.
“Somebody put her there. I want to know. I’m still not going to stop,” Mobley told Action News Jax.
JSO said this ‘missing persons case’ is not classified as a homicide, pending results from the Medical Examiner’s Office.