ALMA, AR – Tuesday marked the 20 year anniversary to the day of the abduction of Morgan Nick from an Arkansas ballpark. Since that time, her mother and police have had to grapple with the passage of time, the challenge of hanging on to hope and the desire to help others any way they can.
It was a day much like any other you’d see at the Alma ballpark complex, on a field no longer standing, that 6-year-old Morgan Nick convinced her mother to let her chase fireflies.
“I told her she couldn’t, that it was late and dark and I didn’t think it was a good idea,” Colleen Nick said. “But she pleaded with me to go play with her friends, and other parents said the kids played at the ballpark all the time. When I told her she could, she hugged me and kissed my cheek.”
Those last few seconds would prove to create a moment Colleen Nick would relive and regret for years.
“If I could go back and change one thing in my life it would be that moment,” she said. “I would have never let her go catch fireflies.”
As the game came to a close on June 9, 1995, Morgan’s friends returned to their parents. But Morgan was not among the faces in the crowd.
“It was such pure childhood innocence and so much evil that met in that same moment,” Nick said. “I can’t imagine what it was like for her in that moment.”
When Nick couldn’t locate Morgan, her living nightmare began.
“The first night Morgan was missing we thought she would be found just any moment,” Nick said. “Once the police arrived, we were sure they would be our knights in shining armor and it would be over at just any moment.”
But any moment became many moments. And the girl who loved kittens and dreamed of joining the circus remained missing.
“There was one point where someone said it had only been four days. I felt like I had lived four lifetimes. We just didn’t think time would keep going by without Morgan being home. It became years. we were enduring years,” Nick said.
Now, 2015 marks 20 years.
“It’s hard to watch so much change,” Nick said, sitting in the bleachers at the same ballpark complex. The bleachers she sat in on that fateful night are now razed and covered as an asphalt parking lot.
“I’ve seen her first grade boyfriend get married and have children. I saw her friends graduate high school,” she said. “It’s such a picture of time moving on while I feel like Morgan has been locked in a time that doesn’t move.”
The information about Morgan’s case, essentially still the same. She was last seen talking to a man next to a red camper truck.
“As long as you get leads it’s never cold, we’re always working leads,” said Alma Police Chief Russell White.
Inside the Alma Police Department, an entire room and two investigators are dedicated to Morgan’s case.
“I believed in us and thought we would solve it. I still do – I just didn’t think it would take 20 years later we’d be working on it,” White said.
White was less than a year into the job of police chief in 1995 when Morgan Nick’s disappearance became his department’s biggest case.
“It was one person probably acting in the moment. And that doesn’t leave a lot of information,” he said. “Conspiracies are easy to investigate because a lot of people know the details. We believe this person is a loner, and if he does have any friends he probably didn’t talk to them about this.”
But White believes whether in the drawers filled full of case files or out on the street, there’s the one piece they’ve been missing for two decades that can solve Morgan’s mystery.
“It’s not from a lack of effort but we obviously haven’t put the right things together,” he said. “But we’re still working on that.”
Colleen Nick has spent the past 7,000 days raising Morgan’s siblings.
“The grief that was so hard for our family could have destroyed it,” she said. “One day I just asked God to bring joy back into my life and allow my children to have happy childhoods. I wasn’t going to let the man that stole Morgan away from us steal one more thing from my family.”
And she’s devoted the better part of these two decades helping find as many missing children as she can through the Morgan Nick foundation.
“In the last 5 years, 40 children who have been missing for longer than 20 years have been recovered and returned safely home,” Nick said.
The foundation serves as a resource for families who have missing children. Connecting them with law enforcement, working to disseminate information on social media and reacting when the need is there.
But the foundation is about proactive steps to make kids feel empowered, meeting face-to-face with about 30,000 Arkansas kids each year to teach them about safety.
Every second, Colleen Nick feels the pain of not having Morgan within arm’s reach.
“My job is to fight for Morgan, and I will fight for her until the day she comes home,” she said.
But she lives each hour with hope and resolve that only a mother of the missing can know.
“I’m her mom. that’s what moms are supposed to do,” she said. “With an army or by myself, I will continue to fight. I’m resolute in fighting to bring her home.”
If you have any information about Morgan’s disappearance, or if you believe you may know Morgan’s whereabouts, please contact police or : 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678).
