WKBT La Crosse, WI-NewsChannel 8-Community Reacts to Alisha Sidie's Death

Reported by Lara Reed

Community Reacts to Alisha Sidie's Death

The seven day search for Alisha Sidie came to end Saturday night, an end no one in the community wanted to hear.

Joycee Bernstein says, "I'm glad she's found and if the person in custody is the person responsible there's complete closure then and that's definitely what the family needs."

Bernstein was a close friend of Alisha's.  She says the way the community came together over the last week was amazing.

"It's been awesome. The closeness and how people came together to show up and go look and to comfort the family, to cook, send food. People cooked who couldn't go out and look," she adds.

More than 100 volunteers helped law enforcement search for Alisha's body in the woods surrounding her home. It was actually one of those volunteers that led to a break for investigators.

Jackson County District Attorney Gerald Fox says, "A volunteer searcher found one of our key pieces of evidence. We are extremely grateful for the assistance we recieved from the public."

In such a small community, the news of Alisha's death hits hard, but it's not hard for friends to share good memories.

Bernstein says, "There's one way she's affected us all and that's by her smile. That smile just gets ya and it gets ya smiling back."

And now with at least some sense of closure, friends and family say they can start to heal.