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Mario Andrette McNeill was sentenced to death on May 29, 2013, for the killing of 5-year-old Shaniya Nicole Davis, whose body was found near the Lee-Harnett county line six days after her mother reported her missing from Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Antoinette Nicole Davis called police on the morning of Nov. 10, 2009, and said her daughter was missing from the family's mobile home. She told a dispatcher she had last seen the girl the evening before. Within days, investigators said the report was a cover story and charged her over her daughter's disappearance.

Police issued an Amber Alert for Shaniya Nicole Davis. Surveillance video from a hotel in Sanford, about 30 miles from Fayetteville, showed a man carrying a small child, and a front desk clerk who saw the Amber Alert the next day called the tip line. McNeill, 29, turned himself in and was charged with kidnapping.

Searchers found Shaniya's body on Nov. 16, 2009, in a kudzu patch off N.C. Highway 87 at the Lee-Harnett county line. The state medical examiner's office identified her the following day. An autopsy attributed her death to asphyxiation and found she had been sexually assaulted. McNeill was charged with first-degree murder and rape on Nov. 19, 2009.

Prosecutors said Antoinette Davis had handed her daughter over to McNeill to settle a drug debt. She was charged with human trafficking and felony child abuse involving prostitution before the body was found, and with filing a false police report over the missing-child call. A grand jury indicted her on first-degree murder in July 2011.

McNeill turned down a plea offer in April 2013 that would have taken the death penalty off the table in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. A Cumberland County jury convicted him on May 24, 2013, of first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, sexual offense of a child, indecent liberties with a child, human trafficking and sexual servitude, and acquitted him of raping the girl. The same jury deliberated less than 40 minutes before recommending death, and Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons imposed the sentence. McNeill was the first defendant sent to death row from Cumberland County in six years.

Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty against Antoinette Davis. In October 2013, before her trial was to begin, she entered Alford pleas to second-degree murder, human trafficking, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree sex offense, felony child abuse with prostitution, child abuse involving a sex act, sexual servitude, indecent liberties with a child and conspiracy to commit a sex offense against a child. An Alford plea allows a defendant to accept conviction while maintaining innocence. Prosecutors reduced the first-degree murder charge after reviewing the trial evidence, and a first-degree rape charge was dismissed. Ammons sentenced Davis, then 29, to 210 to 261 months in prison and ordered her to register as a sex offender for 30 years.