Feb. 10, 2009: Florida girl Haleigh Cummings disappears from her Satsuma home

PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. — It’s been more than a decade since little Haleigh Ann Marie Cummings was reported missing in Putnam County.

Feb. 10, 2009 is the day that the 5-year-old disappeared out of her Satsuma home in the middle of the night.

‘We do not forget:’ 13 years since Haleigh Cummings’ disappearance in Putnam County

The last person to see Haleigh was 17-year-old Misty Croslin, her father’s girlfriend at the time.

Haleigh’s father Ronald Cummings came home from an overnight shift and found that Haleigh had disappeared.

At the time, Croslin told police she woke up to find Haleigh’s bed empty and the back door opened. She believed she was taken. Years later, police found that her story changed.

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Both Croslin and Ronald Cummings are currently in state prison on drug charges. Currently, Cummings is set to be released from Lake Correctional Institute in Clermont on Oct. 17, 2022, and Croslin is set to be released from Lowell Correctional Institute in Gainesville on Jan. 1, 2032.

To this day, there is still an active Florida Amber Alert for Haleigh, who would be 18 years old now. In the years since her 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.

“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.

“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.

The Putnam County Sheriff’s Office released the following statement on the 12th anniversary of Haleigh’s disappearance:

“Twelve years ago our community woke to a real life nightmare with the disappearance of kindergartner Haleigh Cummings. Those who worked diligently to find Haleigh in the hours, days, months and now years have always held hope that someone will come forward with answers. We still have that hope. We still continue to revisit the areas where Haleigh was last seen in hopes of new information and new clues. We know Misty Croslin still has answers to some of our questions and she still has the opportunity to assist. We are saddened and frustrated that we are unable to give Haleigh’s family the closure they so rightfully deserve. Haleigh will continue to haunt our detectives as they try to find her and we will never give up the search.”

Anyone with any information on Haleigh’s whereabouts is asked to call 911 or contact the NCMEC at 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678) or the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office at (386) 329-0801.

Great-grandmother's dying wish Great-grandmother's dying wish

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