PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. — Saturday marks 15 years since an AMBER Alert was issued for 5-year-old Haleigh Cummings, who disappeared from her Satsuma home in Putnam County.
Authorities said she was a Kindergarten student at Browning-Pearce Elementary School when authorities began searching for her on Feb. 10, 2009.
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Misty Croslin, Ronald Cummings’ girlfriend who was babysitting at the time, was the last person to see her on Feb. 9, 2009, the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office said. Croslin reported Haleigh missing, launching a manhunt for the little girl.
Haleigh’s disappearance garnered national attention, but she has never been found.
Her case remains one of Florida’s seven unsolved AMBER Alerts.
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Haleigh would be 20 years old now.
Crime Stoppers of Northeast Florida is offering a reward of $15,000 for help finding Haleigh.
‘We do not forget,” the sheriff’s office shared in a statement online in 2022, along with an image of Haleigh at age 5 and an age progression photo of what she could have looked like at age 12. “ ... She would be in college, technical school or possibly starting a job. Those opportunities such as graduating high school surrounded by family and friends was stolen from her.”
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Croslin, and her former husband, Ronald Cummings — who is Haleigh’s father — have never been charged in Haleigh’s disappearance. However, they both began serving prison sentences for drug trafficking in 2010.
Haleigh’s father was released from prison in October 2022. According to the Florida Department of Corrections, Croslin is expected to be released on June 10, 2031.
Two months after his release from prison, in December 2022, Ronald Cummings was arrested, accused of drug possession and violently resisting an officer. He has been in the Putnam County Jail since his arrest.
In the years since Haleigh’s disappearance, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has released two age-progression photos of her: one of what she would look like at age 8 and one of what she would look like at age 12.
In 2019, Action News Jax sat down with the lead detective in her case, Capt. Dominic Piscitello with the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, who has since retired.
“It’s kind of saddening because we haven’t figured it out,” Piscitello said. “This is a place where a little girl went missing from, an innocent child that had no control over anything in her life. She was merely a mechanism of her family and she is potentially gone because of what her family was or wasn’t, they didn’t keep her safe.”
In 2020, Action News Jax talked to Haleigh’s great-grandmother Annette Sykes, who was dying of stage 4 cancer, and her final wish was to find out what happened to Haleigh.
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“I don’t have much longer and I want to know where she is and what happened to her before I die. I just want that little bit of peace, that little bit of knowledge. That’s all I’m asking for,” she said.
Sykes died in May 2023, according to an obituary posted online.
If you have any information that could help find Haleigh, you’re asked to call 911 or the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office at 1-888-277-8477 or at 386 329-0800.
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