{"id":30106,"date":"2021-02-04T12:29:52","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T17:29:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/?p=30106"},"modified":"2021-02-04T12:29:52","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T17:29:52","slug":"missing-postal-employee-kierra-coles-disappearance-woman-in-video-played-nationwide-wasnt-her-mother-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/2021\/02\/04\/missing-postal-employee-kierra-coles-disappearance-woman-in-video-played-nationwide-wasnt-her-mother-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Missing Postal Employee Kierra Coles Disappearance: Woman in Video Played Nationwide Wasn&#8217;t Her, Mother Says"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\" charset=\"UTF-8\" src=\"https:\/\/nbcchicago.com\/portableplayer\/?CID=1:6:2429001&#038;videoID=1853395523857&#038;origin=nbcchicago.com&#038;fullWidth=y\"><\/script><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"article-subtitle\">&#8220;I didn&#8217;t say anything because I was asked not to,&#8221; said Karen Philips, the mother of missing U.S. postal employee Kierra Coles.<\/h2>\n<p>Karen Philips, the mother of missing U.S. postal employee Kierra Coles, said she prays every night for a good night&#8217;s sleep because she knows when she wakes up, her nightmare begins again.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt feels like a replay. Every day, the same feeling,\u201d said Philips. \u201cDay after day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Philips\u2019 daughter Kierra was three months pregnant when she suddenly disappeared in October 2018.<\/p>\n<p>After two years of no answers, Philips told NBC 5 Investigates she was ready to reveal what Chicago detectives told her not to disclose at the time of her daughter\u2019s disappearance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI didn\u2019t say anything because I didn\u2019t want to mess up the case, \u201c said Philips<\/p>\n<p>Early in the investigation, a chilling video of a postal worker thought to be Kierra Coles surfaced. The Oct. 3 video captured at 11:45 a.m. from a neighbor\u2019s surveillance camera showed what many believed at the time to be Kierra dressed in her postal uniform walking past her parked car in Chicago\u2019s Chatham neighborhood.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA woman calls down to me and says her husband has video,\u201d said NBC Chicago\u2019s Regina Waldroup, who at the time was in the neighborhood knocking on doors and looking for leads. \u201cHe\u2019s saying, &#8216;There she is walking down the street. You see her and she\u2019s in her postal uniform and that\u2019s her. That\u2019s her!'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Waldroup said that everyone covering the story thought this was going to be the big break in the case.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m thinking she\u2019s walked into somebody\u2019s car, so with all the video that they took off the blocks, that we would be able to see exactly what car she got into,\u201d Waldroup said.<\/p>\n<p>A still frame of the video went on Kierra&#8217;s missing posters, and the video aired nationwide.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A Break in the Case?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At the time, Karen Philips was at home watching the video again and again on her cell phone. She went to bed that night thinking something about the video was off.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a mother thing. You just know your child,\u201d said Philips. \u201cThat\u2019s not her walk. She was a little bit smaller and a little bit shorter.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The next day, Philips said she went down to the Chicago police station to talk with detectives about her concerns that it wasn\u2019t her daughter on the video after all.\u00a0 Philips said that Chicago detectives told her that wasn\u2019t her daughter on the video.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe says don\u2019t tell anybody that\u2019s not your daughter,\u201d said Philips, noting that the video was of another woman who lived down the street and worked at the post office.<\/p>\n<p>Philips admitted she remained quiet for years, not saying a word about the video, saying, \u201cNow, I have nothing to lose. I mean, it\u2019s been two years, and you [investigators] have came up with nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Postal inspectors who are the lead agency in the Coles case would not confirm that the video is of another postal employee but did tell NBC 5 Investigates that they have a timeline of Kierra\u2019s whereabouts the night of Oct. 2 before she went missing. More at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcchicago.com\/investigations\/exclusive-kierra-coles-disappearance-woman-in-video-played-nationwide-wasnt-her-mother-says\/2428527\/\">NBC Chicago<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-25416\" src=\"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Kierra-Coles2-300x131.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"131\" srcset=\"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Kierra-Coles2-300x131.jpg 300w, https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Kierra-Coles2.jpg 436w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t say anything because I was asked not to,&#8221; said Karen Philips, the mother of missing U.S. postal employee Kierra Coles. Karen Philips, the mother of missing U.S. postal employee Kierra Coles, said she prays every night for a good night&#8217;s sleep because she knows when she wakes up, her nightmare begins again. \u201cIt [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking","category-video-gallery","last_archivepost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30108,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30106\/revisions\/30108"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}