CINCINNATI — Jessica Revelee was shot to death on a cold January night in 2014. Officers found her body in the middle of McMicken Avenue in Over-the-Rhine. On Tuesday, after more than six years without visible progress, police arrested a fugitive suspect.
Mark Cephas, 26, stands charged with aggravated murder.
“It’s really hard when you hear that because the guy is young and he made a mistake – but the day I found out she was dead – I’m still going through that emotion,” Revelee’s younger sister Eve Stiver said.
Revelee was 24 at the time of her death on Jan. 9, 2014. According to the birth date recorded by the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts, Cephas would have been 19.
Reports at the time indicated that Revelee had been walking down McMicken Street early in the morning when a person in a vehicle shot her.
“We love her with all our hearts,” Revelee’s older sister Laura Stiver said. “I’m never going to give up until everybody’s sitting behind bars, everybody answers for it, and if they’re not able to sit behind bars, God will get them.”
Members of Revelee’s family spoke to WCPO in 2015, during a vigil held to mark the one-year anniversary of her death. Holding torches and lanterns made from tea lights inside plastic cups, her relatives remembered her as a loving sister, daughter and aunt who struggled with addiction throughout her life.
“Jessica came around us and loved all of us and gave everybody everything she had,” said Laura Stivers, her sister.
Stivers worried aloud, then, that Revelee’s problems with substance use would lead the public and investigators to discount her death.
“There is no closure,” one vigil attendee said.
“Until someone comes up and says they did it, we won’t have—“ another started, then cut herself off. She was crying too hard to continue.
Revelee’s family said they believe Cephas may not be the only one at fault.
Anyone with any additional information regarding the death of Jessica Revelee is asked to call Crimestoppers at 513-352-3040.
