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June 10, 2024 21 mins

On August 1st, 2022, Blake Deven was last seen at a Walmart retail store, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Blake was not reported missing until January 19th, of 2024. During the course of the investigation, investigators learned Blake’s adopted sister, London Deven, was also missing. London Deven was last seen in Fayetteville, on June 6th, 2019, though London’s last known location has not been publicly released.

Police are asking the public’s assistance to help build a timeline of events, and are asking for any information leading to the location of Blake or London.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Mysteries and Mimosas and thank you for listening.

(00:14):
I'm Max and with me as usual is my co-host and my wife, Aria.
Hi everyone and welcome to Mystery Monday.
Every Monday we like to give you a short episode on a case that isn't widely covered.
The hope is to bring awareness to those cases that aren't widely publicized.
And don't forget you can find us on Instagram at mysteries and mimosas podcast.

(00:35):
We're on Facebook, YouTube and Tik Tok.
Also if you want to help us out, please rate us five stars and subscribe to our podcast.
Yeah, thank you.
I wasn't done but I'm glad you interrupted me.
But yes, you can do those things.
You can share our podcast with all your friends.
I was going to say I'm on discord but I forgot you told me I'm not allowed to mention that
anymore.

(00:56):
I may have said that.
Yeah, I think so.
That sounds like something I would say.
Yeah, it does.
Anyway.
So today's case is such a weird mystery out of Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to the
military installation Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg.
Fort Bragg was officially renamed Fort Liberty in 2022.

(01:16):
Did you know that?
I did not know that.
You're learning something today.
Fayetteville has many nicknames to include America's can-do city and the soldier city.
Fayetteville has received the All America City Award from the National Civic League
three times.
Wow.
Yeah.
Fayetteville is the sixth most populous city in North Carolina with a population of 208,501

(01:40):
people as of the 2020 census.
Wow, that's kind of big.
So our story today begins in 2011 when a woman by the name of Avante Devin adopted a girl
named London in Buncombe County.
Avante then adopted a boy named Blake in neighboring Madison County in 2013.

(02:03):
There's very little information available related to the adoptions because those records
are sealed once they're finalized in North Carolina.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah.
So there's not a lot of info out there.
But an article in the Fayetteville Observer mentions that Avante Devin divorced her husband
in 2006 and they shared no property or children.
Then the following year in 2007, the North Carolina Division of Non-Public Education

(02:29):
indicates that a homeschool by the name of Devin Academy was opened in Buncombe County.
So she just opened her own school?
It seems like it.
I don't know of any other children she had at the time or anything, so I'm not sure why
she started the homeschool.
Yeah, or who attended or...
Yeah.
Doesn't give any of that information.

(02:50):
And since that time, Devin Academy has had several changes of address and phone numbers
in both Madison and Buncombe Counties.
According to a news conference held in April by the Chief of Police in Fayetteville, Kimberly
Braden, the Devin family moved to the Fayetteville area in 2015 and there's no indication that
either Blake or London ever attended a public school in Cumberland County.

(03:13):
Okay.
So if she adopted...I'm just thinking, if she adopted Blake in 2011...
No, in 2013.
Oh, I'm sorry.
In 2013 and London in 2011, but they didn't move to North Carolina until 2015.
I wonder what state they were adopted from.
Well, I don't think they moved to a different state.

(03:37):
They just moved to Fayetteville.
Oh, okay.
From Buncombe County.
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah, they were living in Buncombe County in Madison County.
And then in 2015, they came over to Cumberland County, which is Fayetteville.
Okay.
So presumably these children were adopted in North Carolina.
Right.
And that's why there's not a lot of information because records are sealed in North Carolina

(03:57):
when the adoptions are finalized.
Okay, I'm tracking.
Yeah.
So I think it all happened in North Carolina, just in different counties.
Makes sense.
Yeah.
In 2019, Devon's LLC, Nelson & Johnson, purchased a home on Berrydale Drive in Fayetteville.
Avante Devon is said to still reside at this address.

(04:18):
Nelson & Johnson LLC is registered in New Mexico and was established there in 2016.
The business purpose is listed as gatherings for various artists showings and book sharing
slash readings.
No selling entailed.
The mailing address for the company is listed in Sedona, Arizona and notes that any correspondence

(04:38):
should be made in the care of a David Novick.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So I don't know what all of this means.
LLC is?
Well, it seems like it's some sort of artist showing or something to do with art in New
Mexico.
I mean, depending on where this LLC or business operates, near Taos or Santa Fe, it's very
artistic.
Oh, no, that totally makes sense.

(04:58):
And so is Sedona.
Right.
Oh, all of that makes sense.
It's just interesting that she's a member of that and she lives all the way out in North
Carolina.
So I don't know what that connection is.
Right.
But she apparently owns these properties.
They're being purchased by the LLC.
That makes sense.
Okay.
Yeah.
Interesting.
But on January 19th of 2024, so this year at 117 in the afternoon, Avante called 911

(05:25):
and reported her 17 year old adopted son Blake as a runaway.
I have a 911 call pulled up and we can take a listen, but she mentions him possibly going
to a Buddhist retreat, says she hasn't seen him since between Thanksgiving and Christmas
of 2022.
So let's take a listen.
Do you think he is a runaway?

(05:49):
I think so.
He is generally religious and he used to go back and forth about a Buddhist retreat and
meditation, things like that.
But this time he never called back.
My daughter did that once for six months and she called.
So I thought, okay, it's how he's really independent, high, strong and very bossy.
So it's not really unlikely of his character, but I'm sorry, now where's your question?

(06:15):
Do you think he's a runaway?
I would say so, yeah.
When did you last see him?
I told you during those holiday times, about a year and a half ago.
So what holiday time?
The last holiday between Thanksgiving and Christmas?
Around 2023 or 2022.

(06:37):
Oh, goodness gracious.
2022.
Wow, that's a crazy 911 call.
She even references her daughter.
I'm wondering if she's referencing London saying that she's done the same thing, but
she waited a year and a half, two years to report this.
Yeah, that's interesting.

(06:58):
I know she mentions in that 911 call that he was independent and strong and brave and
all these things.
But if you think about it, when she's making this call, he's around 17 years old.
So if you go back a couple of years, we're talking about a 15-year-old kid that said

(07:20):
he's going off to a Buddhist retreat and you haven't heard from him in a year and a half.
And you're just okay with that?
Yeah, you never thought to call before this.
Yeah, super odd.
I can't imagine any parent, I'm just thinking out loud.
I can't imagine any parent having their 15-year-old teenager run away from home on this quote

(07:40):
unquote Buddhist retreat and not reporting them missing immediately or as a runaway immediately.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Okay.
And you haven't heard from him in a year and a half.
Yeah.
So you're not concerned until now?
And I wonder what kind of spurred her to even call 911 now?
Why all of a sudden?
Why all of a sudden?
I don't know.

(08:01):
Yeah, that's really interesting.
So that was on January 19th.
So then fast forward to March 27th of this year, the Fayetteville police, along with
the FBI, searched three Fayetteville locations as part of their investigation into the disappearance
of Blake.
One of those was the home of Avante.

(08:22):
Interesting.
So they're obviously suspicious too.
Yes.
I mean, something's going on.
Something happened between January when she made this call and the end of March when police
and the FBI are searching these three locations.
Correct.
So this case is, it's odd anyway, right?
The circumstances, everything about it is just strange.

(08:43):
But then there's a lot of information too, I think that the police have that they're
just not releasing.
So we don't have a ton of information to go off of.
So we really just kind of have a timeline of events going forward from that March 27th
date.
So on March 28th, the day after they conducted those searches, the Fayetteville police issued

(09:06):
a news release about Blake's disappearance.
So then we're at March 28th, March 30th, two days later, employees of Cape Fear Medical
Center sent a welfare check to Avante Devon's home because they were unsuccessful in contacting
her with issues related to her mother's medical care.
So apparently Avante's mother is in the hospital at this time and she is unable to make medical

(09:32):
decisions for herself.
So Avante is listed as her caregiver and the hospital has been trying to contact her because
they need someone to, you know, give permission to do these medical procedures.
And so they're unable to get ahold of her.
They send someone out to do a welfare check.
However, when police conduct the welfare check, nobody would answer the door.
So as a result of all of this, a judge ordered Avante's mother's medical care to be overseen

(09:56):
by DSS and that her mother's assets were to be frozen at that time.
So the judge ruled that Avante can visit her mother in the hospital, but she's not allowed
to make any of her medical decisions.
The judge noted that his decision was made due to information received that Avante was
possibly exploiting her mother for financial gain.

(10:16):
Interesting.
Yeah.
So there's a lot going on with Avante.
Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts in this for sure.
So on April 4th of this year, it was discovered that there was another missing person associated
with the Devon case.
At this time, the Fayetteville Police Department announced 27 year old London Devon was also
missing.
London Devon was last seen alive on June 6th of 2019, but the location where she was last

(10:42):
seen has not been disclosed.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Two kids from the same adopted family are now missing.
And she's been missing since 2019.
So five years and she was never reported and she wasn't even reported missing now.
They just learned of it.
Exactly.
Through Blake's investigation.
During their investigation into Blake's disappearance, they find out, wait a second, he has a sister,

(11:05):
an adopted sister who was also missing.
She's an adult.
She's 27 now, so she went missing when she was around 22.
But yeah, interesting for sure.
So on April 12th, police made an announcement that partial skeletal remains were found at
an undisclosed location.
They did, however, say that these remains were not located at that Berrydale drive home

(11:29):
where Avante is living now.
Police are awaiting testing to determine the identity of the skeletal remains.
Well, that kind of makes me wonder how much of a remain there is, you know, how much,
how many skeletal bones or remains there are for them to even test.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It doesn't say.
Because, you know, it's not easy.
It's not an easy task to get DNA results from skeletal remains or bones.

(11:53):
I mean, it can happen, but it takes quite a bit of a sample in order to come up with
a DNA profile.
So that's going to be months, if not years, maybe a year or more before they're able to
even come up with a profile.
And then the hard work begins because then they're going to have to start trying to maybe
talk to the bio parents or see if, you know, they're going to probably start with Blake

(12:18):
and London's parents to see if that's a match.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of, a lot of variables, I guess, that go into that, you know, how
old are their remains?
How long have they been there?
Were they well preserved or have they been exposed to elements?
And, you know, who knows?
All of those things are going to plan.
And police aren't saying where they were found.

(12:40):
No, they're keeping all of that confidential right now.
Sure.
So on April 18th, police issued another news release asking for the public's assistance
in establishing a timeline of when Blake and Devin were last seen.
Wow.
So they need a timeline.
So we don't even, that's why we don't have a timeline.
Exactly.
That's a good one because police don't even know what's going on yet.

(13:00):
Right.
Yeah.
I know this information is kind of all over the place, but that's why, because it's been
so long since they've been seen alive that nobody really knows for sure when they were
last seen.
And, and you're right.
The information is all over the place, but you know what?
You're doing a great job.
Thank you.
I'm proud of you.
I'm trying.
Yeah.

(13:21):
You're doing great.
It was a really, actually for, for Mystery Monday, you know, our typically short episodes,
this one took a little bit more digging and you know, to try to find information cause
there's not a lot out there.
So yeah.
Um, another interesting piece of information that I found though was that Avante also adopted
two of Blake's biological brothers, but there's no further information about either of them.

(13:42):
I don't know if they were older or younger or where they're at now.
Right.
No idea.
So whether they're looking for Blake or whether they're missing with Blake, no idea.
So I mean, she has at least four children.
I don't know if there's more beyond that or not.
Um, that's the only only mention of the, the other two boys.
You know, I don't want, okay, I'm going to preface this by saying, I don't think, I don't

(14:06):
necessarily think that's what this is.
And I'm not accusing anybody of this, but it just reminds me of a presentation I watched
once on like ritualistic cult abuse in foster homes and different homes.
And man, that's a, that's an entirely different set of, um, circumstances, you know, and w and
what it basically is, is just these, um, families, you know, parents are engaged in this ritualistic

(14:33):
cult abuse.
And it is a pretty daunting task for investigators to be able to come up with the, you know,
the charges and criminal elements in order to, to charge people with that.
And I'm not saying that's what this is, but it just kind of eerily reminds me of the presentation
that I saw on that.
Yeah.

(14:53):
And you know, in cases like this, it kind of, it goes back to the whole, you know, she
had this homeschool since 2007.
So I don't, you know, I don't know if she had more kids before Blake in London, but
when children are homeschooled like that, like there's not really a whole lot of oversight.
The public's right.

(15:14):
The public school never knew about them.
So you know, there was no, you know, report or anything when all of a sudden these kids
aren't coming to school or any of that, because they were never enrolled in school.
They were doing this homeschool thing the whole time.
So there wasn't, I mean, outside of maybe family, I don't know how close the family
was to say, Hey, we haven't seen Blake or London in several years, you know, but nobody

(15:37):
said anything.
Neighborhood friends maybe.
But even then you figure, you know, if you have kids and they're playing with, you know,
Jimmy down the street or whatever, if he just goes missing for a while, you might not even
think about it.
You might, you know, occasionally say, I wonder where that kid went.
You used to play with him all the time, but then you move on because kids get new friends.
And so you're right.
There's no accountability whatsoever when they're not enrolled in public school.

(15:59):
And I mean, it sounds too, like they moved a lot that that homeschool had several different
addresses and phone number changes over the course of those, you know, years where they
were in Buncombe County, Madison County.
Then they moved to Fayetteville.
There was a lot of movement going on too.
So even if they had friends in the neighborhood, they moved.

(16:20):
Okay.
They're in a different house now.
They're in, you know, nobody's going to notice that they're missing if they don't know, you
know, that they're even there.
You know, I hate to point out the obvious, but I mean, the most suspicious thing here
is two kids from the same adopted family are missing and there is a significant, a massive
significant delay in the reporting of them as not even missing, but runaways.

(16:43):
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I don't, in London was never reported missing.
Right.
She wasn't reported at all.
She's just discovered that out when they were doing this investigation.
So she was never reported as any saying, but she would have been 22.
She was an adult when she went missing in 2019.
But yeah, she, she wasn't even ever reported.
So who knows how long that would have gone on before anybody realized that she was missing.

(17:06):
It's already been five years and nobody knew.
So yeah, I think it's super, super weird, which, which is why this is a great mystery
Monday episode.
So although Blake was last seen by Avante between or so she reports between Thanksgiving
and Christmas of 2022, Blake is described as a white male, five foot three inches, 120

(17:27):
pounds.
Obviously his weight and his height may be different now because this was several years
ago.
Blake is described as having blonde hair and blue eyes and his birth name was actually
Trenton Dwayne Schuller.
Blake also suffers from static encephalopathy, which is a form of brain damage related to
prenatal exposure to alcohol.

(17:49):
That's a hard word to say.
Yes, it is.
London was last seen in 2019.
Her birth name was Mariah Elizabeth Foster.
Mariah was removed from her home because of allegations of abuse and was approximately
22 years old at the time of her disappearance.
We don't really know how old she was.
She was 21 or 22.

(18:09):
London would be 27 years old today.
And unfortunately we don't have a physical description of London and the only photograph
available that we were able to find and that's been widely shared throughout the media is
a photo of London when she's 12 years old.
And so that's, that's another curious thing.
If Avante is so concerned about this child, adult now, or her, you know, her adopted kid,

(18:37):
why is there no updated pictures of when the time she was missing?
Yeah.
And the same goes for Blake too.
The only picture of him is from several years prior to the 2022, year 2022 when he was last
seen.
Yeah.
He looks like a child, like a little boy in that picture.
There's no updated descriptive information, unfortunately.

(18:59):
Right.
You know, I'm, I'm interested.
I'm going to, I mean, we're obviously going to follow this case and hopefully we have
answers as this unfolds.
You know, I think it's going to be probably a year or more down the road before we have
more answers that we can provide an updated episode.
So if you have any information about the disappearances of Blake or London, Devin, you're encouraged

(19:19):
to contact the Fayetteville police department at 910-578-2697.
Wow.
Such a crazy case.
Yeah.
It's very interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, it is, there's so many different news articles that just give all kinds of weird,
different information that this was very difficult for us to put together.

(19:41):
And so if you have any information, you know, please call the Fayetteville police department
or you know, we have actually received tips through mysteries and mimosas.net through
our social media.
So if you have any information or if Blake or London are alive, we would really encourage
you to contact us as well.
If you happen to hear this, wouldn't that be great?
Absolutely.
In the meantime, please remember to follow us on Instagram at mysteries and mimosas podcast.

(20:06):
Check us out on the interweb on the web, the internet at www.mysteriesandmimosas.net.
And also our TikTok channel.
Yes.
Please follow us there.
Yeah.
We're getting a lot of viewers.
A lot of people love the TikTok.
What?
What's so funny?

(20:28):
You called it the TikTok.
Yeah, that's what it is.
It's the TikTok.
Okay.
No, I don't know that there's a thought in front of it.
I think it's just TikTok.
Oh, okay.
Well, I call it the TikTok.
That's what I do.
I post videos on the TikTok.
Okay, occasionally I get lost in the TikTok algorithm and I start just, you know, I sit
down and I start to watch one and then another one and another one.

(20:50):
And by the time, you know, I'm late to work.
Everybody's having to pick up my slack.
That's just it's like it's like potato chips.
You can't eat just one.
No, you can't look at just one reel or one video.
You're absolutely right.
Yeah, it is addictive.
Okay.
You have anything else for us?
I got nothing else.
Okay.
In that case, thanks for listening.
Cheers.

(21:11):
Cheers.
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