Missing Milwaukee Woman Serena Trotter Found Dead in Alley

Serena Trotter was already missing for months when a bystander spotted an unresponsive woman near 44th and Garfield in Milwaukee’s Washington Park neighborhood and called police around 8:15 a.m. on April 22. Milwaukee police later identified the woman found in the alley as 26-year-old Serena Trotter, turning a missing-person case into a death investigation with a long, painful gap at its center.

That gap is what has made this case hit so hard in Milwaukee. Tom Trotter, Serena’s grandfather, reported her missing to Milwaukee Police Department District 3 in late January, months before her body was found. Milwaukee police have said there is no 24-hour waiting period to report a missing person, a detail that has taken on sharper meaning in a case where the family says the search began early and still ended in tragedy.

The scene itself raised immediate concern. Police reported that Trotter was naked and had scattered abrasions and contusions when she was discovered in the alley. The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office has said Trotter’s cause of death had not yet been determined, so officials have not publicly classified the case as a homicide. For now, the file remains open, and the most basic question, how Serena Trotter died, has not been answered.

Tom Trotter later went door-to-door through Washington Park on May 1, handing out fliers and looking for anyone who might have seen his granddaughter. He lives in Menominee, Michigan, and has said he was frustrated with police and worried the people who left Serena in the alley would never be held accountable. The search effort underscored how much of the burden had shifted to the family once the case went cold.

Milwaukee County says homicide cause-of-death details can be suppressed while a case is under active law-enforcement investigation, which helps explain why the public record remains thin. The county medical examiner’s public-data page says deaths under its jurisdiction are updated in real time, but that does not fill in the biggest blank here. Serena Trotter was not just found dead in an alley. She was missing first, and four months later her family was still waiting for the most basic account of what happened to her.