“She loved the Air Force, she loved what she had done,” Elizabeth Dillard said. “She would call me every day and tell me how wonderful it was.”

Since they talked every day, Dillard was surprised when she didn’t hear from Rhianda over the weekend of July 30-31. She texted Rhianda and asked her to call but got no response.

On Monday, someone from the Air Force came and knocked on her door in Mississippi.

“They told me my baby died,” Dillard said.

She learned from her daughter’s friends that a fellow airman had summoned a sergeant when Rhianda didn’t respond to a knock on the door of her Offutt dorm room. They found her dead in her room.

Rhianda had never mentioned Wilsey to her mother, but Elizabeth Dillard said friends told her he was part of a large group of Offutt airmen who socialized together.

“My daughter didn’t date, so they weren’t together or anything,” Dillard said.

She later learned that Wilsey — a member of the 55th Intelligence Support Squadron — had been seen escorting Rhianda to her dorm room on the afternoon of Friday, July 29.

That’s the last time anyone saw Rhianda alive, she said. Wilsey disappeared, too.