NC NC - Ebonee Spears, 30, Wilmington, 15 Jan 2016

Ebonee Spears is missing. The 31-year-old Wilmington woman was last heard from Friday evening when she told her mom she was home watching TV.

By 1 a.m. Saturday, Harriet Rivers realized something was amiss with her youngest child. Spears' friend called to say he'd been at her daughter's house for three hours waiting on her. Her purse and car were there, but she was nowhere to be found.

Now, a week after she disappeared, the family is frantic.

“She just wouldn't walk away,” Rivers said.

On Monday, as the Wilmington Police Department searched Spears' Brooklyn Lane apartment, members of Brunswick Search and Rescue scoured the woods nearby. Neither search offered any clues that police are sharing with the family, Rivers said. As a matter of fact, she added, she filed the missing person report on Saturday and it wasn't until Monday when she heard back from an investigator. If police are taking the issue seriously, she hasn't been reassured of that.

“This isn't a game,” Rivers said. “She's just like gone.”

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It's been six days since Harriet Rivers talked with her daughter Ebonee.

"Its been horrible," Ebonee's mom says. "We're trying to do the normal stuff because we got her daughter here and we have two little grandchildren here. We're trying to keep things normal but its hard."

A family friend notified Ebonee's parent's after midnight that he wasn't able to reach Ebonee after trying for hours.

Rivers reported her daughter missing Saturday but says police didn't start their search until after the Martin Luther King holiday.

"We did our own search on Monday," Rivers said with frustration."They did their search on Tuesday. We distributed flyers and everything on Monday. then Tuesday they went out with a team, dogs or whatever and searched the surrounding area neighborhood.

Rivers thinks the department took too long to start a search.

So does Coquitta Whitaker, Ebonee's best friend since middle school.

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Businesses across Wilmington are joining the search efforts to find a woman who has been missing for almost two weeks.

Ebonee Spears, 30, was last seen at the Pointe at Taylor Estates on January 16. Detectives with the Wilmington Police Department are still treating this as a missing person case, but the Cue Center for Missing Persons said it is more than that.

Spears’ mother Harriet Rivers said she last spoke to her daughter on Friday, January 15. She said Ebonee has one daughter.

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