They’d been searching for 45-year-old Tange Davis-Hutti for days — family and friends driving neighborhoods, posting pleas, replaying the last video of her leaving a home on October 9. The kind of worry that sits heavy in the chest had turned angry and frantic when she didn’t show up for work and stopped answering calls. What started as a missing-person scare became a homicide investigation almost overnight.
Cobb County police say their dispatch center first got a 911 call on October 11, and officers were sent to the Lidl on Floyd Road in Mableton after Tange’s son used OnStar to track her vehicle and led them to that parking lot. That’s where investigators first spoke with people close to her and began piecing together her last known movements.
Tange’s boyfriend, 56-year-old Cecil McCrary, turned up at the scene and told officers the last time he saw her she was leaving his house. He handed over video footage that appeared to show her walking away on the evening of October 9 — footage the family clung to as proof she’d been alive that night. But as detectives dug deeper, the pictures and timelines stopped adding up.
Friends and family weren’t idle. They organized searches, drove by McCrary’s home, and said they had a meeting arranged with him that he didn’t show up for. Social media amplified their concern; videos and posts made it clear people were scared and suspicious, especially once they started talking about the couple’s history of arguments and violence. That community pressure helped push the case forward — Cobb County officers issued a BOLO and shared the alert on social platforms.
Hours after the BOLO went out, police arrested McCrary. During questioning, investigators say he admitted to killing Tange and told officers he had buried her body on a property inside the City of Atlanta. Both Cobb County detectives and Atlanta police went to the location he identified and discovered her remains. For a family that had been searching in growing dread, confirmation arrived in the worst possible form.
Cobb County has acknowledged it had previously responded to multiple domestic-violence calls involving the couple, and at the time of this killing McCrary was out on pretrial release on charges tied to kidnapping and aggravated assault from those prior incidents. That fact has already stirred outrage and painful questions about how the system managed earlier complaints and why he was free when Tange vanished.
Now McCrary is behind bars and facing homicide allegations while the police and prosecutors begin the slow work of charging and building a case. For Tange’s loved ones there’s no real closure in an arrest — only a small sense that the truth is finally being told and that justice may follow. Neighbors and advocates are raising the alarm about domestic-violence warning signs and how communities and courts respond before tragedies happen.
Through it all, the image of Tange — a mother who vanished on an ordinary October evening — lingers with people who knew her. Friends describe a woman who was dependable and warm; a son who used every tool he had to find his mother; a circle of people left with questions and grief. The police have asked anyone with information to come forward, and the larger conversation now is about prevention: how to keep the next person from becoming another headline.
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