Alexis Robinault Sharkey

After growing up in Youngsville, Alexis Robinault Sharkey wanted to see the world and live somewhere warm.

She had made a new home in Texas but found time to return to her Warren County roots often.

The day before Thanksgiving, she had been talking to her mother, Stacy Clark Robinault, about visiting again.

Three days later, Alexis Robinault Sharkey, 26, was found dead along a road west of Houston.

In Houston, she was a social media influencer. Almost as many people followed her on Instagram as the entire population of Warren County.

In Warren County, she will be remembered as someone that was a hard worker, involved, driven, and fun.

“She is someone that is a lot of fun to be around,” Robinault said. “Everybody keeps saying the same things… ‘She was so much fun. She made everything so much fun.'”

“She was extremely active in high school athletics and National Honor Society,” Robinault said.

She graduated third in her class at Youngsville High School in 2012. Her analytical, logical, and reasoning mind helped her be accepted into the pharmacy program at Duquesne. But, it also made her see the financial benefits of staying closer to home.

She decided to attend the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and, in 2016, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in biology.

“In college, she was inducted into Pitt’s Top 2 percent every year,” Robinault said. “She was a really strong student and really driven.”

Staying local was never a long-term plan.

“She always wanted to sprout wings and travel,” Robinault said. “She wanted to move where it was warm and see the world.”

But, she couldn’t stay away.

“She had very deep roots with very close friends and family,” Robinault said. “She came home often… as often as you can living in Texas.”

“She loved home,” she said. “She loved being on the reservoir in our boat.”

Alexis hadn’t been able to make it home for almost a year.

“She was last home last Christmas,” Robinault said. “We were supposed to get together in April… and then COVID. We were supposed to get together for Thanksgiving… and then COVID.”

“That one’s the heartbreaker,” she said. “If we would have been together, nothing would have happened.”

Last week, “We were planning Christmas. We had been texting back and forth. She was gearing up for it,” Robinault said. “She was planning on coming home for Christmas when she was killed.”

“We got calls on Saturday night, simultaneously, from Lexi’s husband, as well as a friend of Lexi’s, that she was missing and that she hadn’t been heard from since 6 p.m. Friday,” she said.

The family went “into freak, panic mode,” she said. “You start calling everyone and everything.”

She went to social media. “We were told to get posting so we could get people looking,” Robinault said. “We also had a lot of people reach out to us — people that are now involved in the case.”

The news went from bad to worse in a few hours.

“As I am sitting at 3 in the morning on my phone desperately looking at news sources, one of them was saying that the body of a 20-something year old woman had been found,” Robinault said. “After talking to the right people and getting it figured out, that found woman on Saturday morning was actually my daughter.”

“She had been dead before we ever knew she was missing,” she said.

Police are investigating, but no charges had been filed Tuesday.

“Because of the nature of the way she was found, there’s no question that this was not an accident,” Robinault said. “The investigation is really going for it.”

“They’re still fully investigating a lot of different things that they have to,” she said. “There are a ton of things to the investigation.”

The story is a national one and Robinault is fielding a lot of calls, without having a lot of answers.

“I get calls, literally, from Fox News, Good Morning America, asking for updates,” she said. “I don’t have them. They’re still actively investigating.”

“This is ongoing,” Robinault said. “We want to get justice for her.”

A hashtag — #justiceforalexis — and a gofundme to support bringing Alexis home, and funeral and memorial expenses, have been set up.

“So many people know her and know her with our family,” Robinault said. “She was so young and so vibrant.”