Tarena Hopgood: The Perfect Smile

There’s a video on Sherry Shareef’s (formerly Sherry Hopgood) Instagram that was posted in August of 2024. It features a young Black woman caught in old photographs of different moments of her life. One photograph is of her leaning down with her arms wrapped around two young boys. Her dark hair is straightened and pulled up into a bun. Short bangs cover her forehead, and two silver hoop earrings hang from her ears. She wears a dark blue puffy winter coat with a fur lining. A lighter sweatshirt is tied around her neck. Her smile is wide, showing off pearly white teeth, causing her eyes to scrunch up slightly. 

The perfect smile. 

The woman in the photograph is Tarena Hopgood, who went missing from Milwaukee the day after Mother’s Day in 2004. 

Underneath the video, Sherry Shareef wrote “Happy Birthday Sister! You will never be forgotten!! Love You!!”

#20yearsmissing. 

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A post shared by Sherry Shareef (@shareef.sherry)

About 32,711 people have gone missing in the City of Milwaukee in the last 10 years, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. At any given time, about 500 people are actively missing in Milwaukee. Many are people of color, yet very few make the news. 

In 2024 through Oct. 15, 2,466 people were reported missing in the city. Each year in the past decade, between 2,500 and 3,300 people have been reported missing each year. Many are short-term missing cases where people are quickly found, highlighting a crisis of online grooming, group home runaways, drug addiction, and other issues. Stereotypical stranger abductions are exceptionally rare, and those are the ones that tend to be highlighted in the news. 

A team of 12 Media Milwaukee student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee but several from smaller Wisconsin cities. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests. In the case of Tarena Hopgood, Milwaukee police declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full police file to Media Milwaukee.

The student reporter researching Tarena Hopgood’s disappearance tried to get in touch with the family. Unfortunately, none so far has agreed to an interview. They have frequently posted on social media about Hopgood though. On the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, a relative wrote on Facebook, “Think about her from time to time and my last words to her. If I never see her again she is in my heart and thoughts.”

However, the student was able to obtain the entire police file on Tarena Hopgood from the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) through an open records request. The file is over 300 pages long and contains family interviews, arrest reports, and DNA documents. The information presented below comes from these files. 

Tarena Hopgood was 32 years old when she went missing 20 years ago. 

The day before she went missing, it was Mother’s Day. May 9, 2004.  Tarena Hopgood and her sister Sherry Hopgood sat at the Metropolitan Hall bar on the corner of N. 6th and W. Clarke Sts. in Milwaukee, Wis., a residential area, mixed with single-family houses and duplexes. A Historic Designation Study Report described it as a two-story building in the Queen Anne style with a social hall and a “flamboyant structure.” 

The sisters drank and Hopgood spent the night talking to a man named Roger Johnson, a Marquette professor at the time and a regular at the bar. 

At 10 p.m., the sisters left and went home to Sherry’s apartment in the area of 8948 N. Michele St., Milwaukee, WI. 

Sherry left for work the next morning, and Tarena was still in her apartment. According to Sherry in the files, she returned home and her boyfriend, Andre Conley, came over around 8 p.m. 

The three of them were hanging out and drinking beer when suddenly Tarena asked for a ride around 1 a.m. 

When Sherry and Andre asked where Tarena was going, she wasn’t specific in her answer and was denied the ride. She then asked for some money, stating she would take the bus instead. Conley obliged her and gave her two or three dollars. 

Tarena proceeded to make one or two phone calls, to whom or where is unknown. Sherry believes one was to the bus company to ask about the bus routes. Tarena then left the house, with only the clothes on her back, saying to her sister, “I will be back soon.” 

That was the last time Sherry saw her.

Tarena was known to leave for short periods of time. According to her father John Hopgood and other family members, Tarena always called “from time to time,” to indicate that she was safe.

Since that night on May 10, 2004, she has not called. 

John Hopgood made the initial missing person report on June 6, 2004, one month after Tarena was last seen by her sister. A month delay can make a police investigation a lot tougher.

In the report, the early shift police officer at District 4 wrote, “Mr. Hopgood stated he is concerned because his daughter is schizophrenic and (allegedly) smokes crack cocaine.” 

He stated that Tarena was medicating for schizophrenia. This issue doesn’t come up again in other interviews that are conducted in the investigation. Police officers did make an effort to contact nearby hospitals, but she wasn’t in any of the facilities. 

The police files indicate several times that Tarena was allegedly working at times as a prostitute and had a drug abuse problem. 

But Tarena was also a mother to two young boys, Miguel and Nigel Hicks. Her father described her as “very intelligent.” He stated that Tarena had a 3.0 GPA when she graduated from Madison High School. 

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A post shared by Sherry Shareef (@shareef.sherry)

Tarena was a churchgoer, according to Sherry. She attended church at Grace Morning Star located in the area of 38th and Villard Ave.

While Sherry and John Hopgood had not seen or heard from Tarena since Mother’s Day, the investigation revealed she was seen twice more in the following days. 

On May 11, 2004, Acey Jones, Tarena’s cousin, was at home with her daughter when a dark burgundy late 80’s Old Delta pulled in front of her house between two and three p.m. 

She described the interior as dark in color, with the windows not tinted. It didn’t have any fancy rims or tires. On the driver’s side, the area between the front and back doors was rusty and missing paint. 

Jones saw a Black man between 35-45 years old behind the wheel. He had a short black afro and a goatee that ran from the sides of his mouth to his chin. 

On the passenger side was Tarena Hopgood. 

Jones stated that Hopgood exited the car and walked up to her house with a bag of groceries from Aldi.

In the files, Jones described Tarena wearing a white t-shirt with a “trippy” design on the front with tight blue jeans. She had a sliver nose piercing with her hair combed and parted into “afro puffs.”

She also wore a thin black plastic waist-length jacket with a rectangular black leather purse with long shoulder straps. 

Jones and Tarena chatted. Jones reflected that “it appeared to her that there was nothing in her [Tarena’s] life that was bothering her and things were going well for her.” 

Tarena never mentioned the driver’s name. As she left, she told Jones “she was going to return to her home tonight.” She never did. 

Jones wasn’t the last person to see Tarena after May 10, 2004. 

Roger Johnson, the professor Tarena talked to on May 9, 2004, at the Metropolitan Hall (or Metro Bar) told police that on May 12 or 13, 2004 he received a phone call from a person claiming to be Tarena “asking him for a ride somewhere near W. Mill Rd.” 

Johnson was a regular at the bar. At the time, Sherry was dating the owner Lamont Whitehead. That night Sherry introduced the two, and Johnson stated that Tarena looked “decent,” but he wasn’t attracted to her. He still gave her his wireless cell phone number, which during his interview on July 23, 2004, he claimed to have ‘lost’. 

According to him, the night Tarena called him he went over to W. Mill Rd. When he saw her he stated, “She had no hair and was geeked out.” Roger didn’t recognize her and asked who she was. When she replied “Tarena,” he said, “No you’re not.” She mentioned something about Mother’s Day, but he left without giving her a ride. 

Johnson was the last person to see Tarena. 

In the following investigation, Tarena’s family tried their best to locate her. On July 27, 2004, John Hopgood put Tarena’s photo into a historic black newspaper called The Milwaukee Courier. They also put up posters around the neighborhood. 

In the following weeks, he received several calls telling him that Tarena was spotted on street corners and coming out of liquor stores. One phone call stated that she was seen on the back of a motorcycle with an unidentified white man. 

Tarena was known to hang out with bikers.

In an interview with Tarena’s friend Mellanee Price, Tarena was seen just before Mother’s Day leaving a liquor store and climbing on the back of a motorcycle with an unknown white man. When they drove off, Tarena yelled “I’ll be back soon.” 

Around Nov. 11, 2005, John Hopgood contacted a station in Knoxville, TN. For a brief time, Tarena lived in Knoxville with some family members. The TV station took an interest in her story and presented it. As a result, the Knoxville Sherriff’s Office received phone calls regarding Tarena, but none led to any conclusions. 

Flash forward to Sept. 24, 2020, John would be told by MPD that they will be featuring Tarena on the news and social media in hopes that it will produce any additional leads.

John said, “That was great and he would like that since he has been thinking about her.” 

On Nov. 22, 2024, student journalists were invited to the Sojourner Family Peace Center where they met up with Milwaukee police Captain Erin Mejia, Sergeant Fawn Schwandt and the lone detective working on these long-term missing cases Detective Jamie Sromalla.

Detective Sromalla has been a police officer for seven and a half years. She’s been working in the Sensitive Crimes Division at MPD for only three months as their long-term missing detective.

While Detective Sromalla and her superiors declined to comment specifically on the cases, Media Milwaukee reporters were presented with a PowerPoint presentation about the process for handling missing person cases. Detective Sromalla dove into the nuances of the different categories of missing persons, even going through a case study with the real-life missing case.

It was clear in her knowledge and the way she spoke about these long-term missing cases that she is passionate about her work.

“This position is very challenging, but I’m up for that challenge,” said Sromalla.

She states that every case has its own unique circumstances, making it extra challenging when sometimes a person just doesn’t want to be found.

“Every missing case is different,” said Sromalla. “But it’s not a crime to go missing, so it’s really hard to prove that something other than them packing up their stuff and leaving happened.”

Long-term missing cases aren’t the only things that Detective Sromalla focuses on. Sometimes she’s pulled away to help with more recent cases that need extra attention. Critical missing cases that are fresh have urgency, and there are approximately 500 open missing person cases in her caseload at any given time.

Sromalla says that for each of her cases – color isn’t a factor for her. Neither is whether they are drug users, dealers, mentally ill or they have a troubled past. She says she just wants to provide closure to the families.

“I try to put myself in their situation if it was my child, my parent, my loved one I would want someone to help me,” said Sromalla.

Twenty years later, Tarena’s case remains open. 

Her family remembers her. Every year on Tarena’s birthday her sister Sherry Hopgood (now Sherry Shareef) posts a message to her missing sister. Family and friends flood the comments, all of them expressing their love for Tarena and hoping for answers.

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A post shared by Sherry Shareef (@shareef.sherry)

The Instagram post above is one of many dedicated to her sister. 

If you know anything that could help locate Tarena Hopgood contact the Milwaukee Police Department Sensitive Crimes Division at (414) 935-7405. 

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.