SCHENECTADY — Rogeana Zasa is often told she looks like her mother, Lutricia Steele. Old acquaintances of her mother have even mistakenly called her “Trish” upon seeing her.
It’s one of the few things Zasa, now 23 and living in the Oneida County community of Waterville, has left of her mother, who left 15 years ago to run errands and never returned.
Steele, a then-27-year-old mother of four, left her home on Webster Street in Mont Pleasant on the afternoon of Thursday, May 1, 2008, possibly with a friend, Schenectady police Sgt. Pat Irwin said. She was last seen in the area of State and Erie streets. Her mother Ethel Zasa, who died in 2018, contacted police nearly two weeks later on May 13.
Investigations have since confirmed Steele stopped at a few locations on May 1, Irwin said. She cashed a check at Regina’s Check Cashing on State Street. A receipt from AJ Wright in Hannaford Plaza showed she bought something around 6 p.m. that day.
Other things have not been confirmed, Irwin said. That weekend she was allegedly seen at a casino in Saratoga Springs with friends. The Friday before she reportedly went to Schenectady Planned Parenthood, as she was in the early stages of pregnancy.
Growing up, Rogeana Zasa said she wasn’t initially aware of what happened. At eight years old and in the custody of her stepfather and his family, her mother’s disappearance was chalked up to “just another weekend where she doesn’t want to show up,” she said.
Zasa doesn’t believe her mother walked out. She’s heard claims she used drugs, and knew her mother had been trying to have her sister temporarily care for her two youngest children. But she also knows that arrangement fell apart, because she was terrified of losing custody of them.
“I don’t believe that (she left),” she said. “I don’t think she woke up one day and said, ‘I don’t want them…
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