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       A D.C. man was sentenced Friday to 35 years in prison for second-degree murder in the 2010 death of Unique Harris, a mother of two small boys who was killed in her Southeast Washington apartment while her sons and a young relative slept in a nearby room, according to authorities.

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       They said the convicted culprit, Isaac Moye, removed and hid Harris’s body, which, 13 years later, has yet to be found.

       “You deviant!” Harris’s mother, Valencia Harris, 56, said in D.C. Superior Court as Moye, 46, sat a few feet to her right in an orange jail smock, waiting to be sentenced.

       In her victim-impact address, Harris told Judge Anthony C. Epstein that she wanted to direct her remarks to the man found guilty of killing her daughter, who was 24 when she vanished. “How dare you take my baby girl?” she said to Moye. “I am not a diabolical, demented psychopath like you are, and I thank God I’m not.”

       She added: “If you don’t want to tell me where you put my child so I can give her a decent burial before I die myself, that’s fine. I know God will lead me to her. … I hope you spend the rest of your life being tormented by Unique’s spirit.”

       Moye, who did not speak at the sentencing, was described in court Friday as an abused child who grew up to commit numerous crimes, including rapes, and has spent most of his adult life behind bars.

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       In October 2010, he had just been released from prison after serving five years for assaulting a woman. GPS data from a monitoring device that he was required to wear shows he was in and near Harris’s apartment building, in the Garfield Heights neighborhood, from 10:39 p.m. on Oct. 9 until 7:20 a.m. the following day, prosecutor Vinet Bryant told jurors in the case. She said Moye was visiting Harris that evening.

       When Harris’s two sons, ages 4 and 5, and a 9-year-old female relative awoke Oct. 10, Harris was gone. In the years since, Bryant said, no physical or digital trace of her has turned up. “Absolutely no footprints in the world,” as Bryant put it.

       D.C. homicide detectives questioned Moye, who authorities said had an unrequited romantic crush on Harris, several times over the years before arresting him in December 2020, a few months after the 10th anniversary of Harris’s disappearance. The case against him was based mainly on an array of circumstantial evidence.

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       Bryant said evidence in the case suggested that Moye stopped by Harris’s apartment that evening and tried have sex with her. But Harris, who had a boyfriend in Richmond, rebuffed him, which led to a deadly struggle.

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       Harris’s eyeglasses, without which she could barely see, were still in the apartment after she disappeared, police said. Her purse was there with its usual contents, though her keys and cellphone were missing, and a section of a sofa cushion had been jaggedly cut away, Bryant said. The fabric and the padding that was once beneath it haven’t been found.

       “A sick, twisted psycho who couldn’t take no for an answer,” Harris’s sister, Ashley Jordan, 32, said in her victim-impact address Friday.

       A Superior Court jury convicted Moye in June of second-degree murder. Bryant, an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, sought a 40-year prison sentence. Defense lawyer Jason Tulley asked for a 20-year term.

       “The government complains that Mr. Moye” lacks remorse because “he hasn’t told people where the body is,” Tulley said in court Friday. “He can’t. He can’t. He’s innocent and has no idea what happened to Unique Harris. … He cannot help close that wound.”

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       Tulley added, “The system has convicted an innocent man of murder, and we’ll see what happens on appeal.”

       Since her daughter’s disappearance, Valencia Harris has become an activist in support of missing women and domestic violence victims.

       “I’ve been in the struggle of five lifetimes to stay clean and sober through all this,” she said in court, referring to past substance-abuse problems. To the defendant, she said, “I do owe you for making me the most formidable enemy you ever encountered in your life.”

       When Moye had been led away, Harris stood in a hallway, hugging friends and loved ones.

       “After all these years, I’m mostly satisfied,” she said of the sentence. “Just mostly. I didn’t get what I wanted, but he didn’t get what he wanted, either.”

       correction

       A previous version of this article misspelled the name of defense lawyer Jason Tulley in some instances. The article has been corrected.

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