Florida (Jacksonville) Times-Union -- updated at 10:46 tonight:
By DANA TREEN
The Times-Union
SATSUMA —Misty Croslin said the accusation that she left Haleigh Cummings the night the 5-year-old disappeared is untrue.
Croslin, the 17-year-old girlfriend of Haleigh’s father, said she doesn’t know where the rumor started.
“I was there the whole night,” she told the Times-Union in an interview Wednesday where she shared several details about Haleigh’s disappearance.
It was the third time Croslin has been publicly questioned in the nine days since she called 911 on Feb. 10 to report Haleigh was missing.
As the national attention grows, she and Haleigh’s family have found themselves under more and more scrutiny. Their backgrounds show many of them have been under scrutiny before, including a custody dispute, drug use and brushes with the law, according to court records and interviews.
In the interview Wednesday, Croslin said Haleigh watched “Madagascar” and “AirBud” with her brother, then snuggled beneath a blanket in a pink Hannah Montana top. She reported Haleigh was wearing that top when she disappeared.
However, Croslin said she found the shirt on Monday, when she was allowed back inside the doublewide mobile home for the first time since the disappearance. She was there to discuss the layout of the mobile home with investigators and was looking for the clothes Haleigh wore her last day at school.
She then saw the Hannah Montana shirt in a laundry pile by the back door. “When I put her blanket on she had that shirt on,” Croslin told the Times-Union on Wednesday.
She said she has no idea how the shirt wound up there.
Investigators changed a statewide Amber Alert to remove the shirt as a clothing description.
Croslin said the children’s great-grandmother, her brother and an air-conditioning repairman were the only ones to visit the mobile home that day.
After eating, Croslin said the children watched movies before Haleigh went to bed about 8:15 p.m.
The children’s father, 25-year-old Ronald Cummings, was on an evening shift at PDM Bridge in Palatka and arrived home about the time Croslin was making the 911 call.
Since then, a team of investigators sifting through 1,200 calls and tips over nine days have sent boats into the St. Johns River and searchers into the scrub miles from where Haleigh went missing about 3 a.m. Feb. 10.
So far none has produced significant results, but some tips are being considered solid, authorities said Wednesday. They said they remain optimistic.
A vehicle was seized and processed, said Dominick Pape, chief of the Jacksonville office of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Pape would not release other information about the vehicle other than to say it was taken early in the investigation.
Croslin also told the Times-Union that the day Haleigh disappeared, she told authorities a cousin who had been staying in Crescent City for about a month went back to Tennessee. She said the cousin had “messed with” her sexually when she was a child but not been deemed a sexual offender.
The cousin had visited the mobile home she shared with Cummings but was told not to come back when a gun in the house turned up missing around the same time, she said.
As the investigation stretched on, a look at the family’s background shows some of the instabilities and conflicts that add to an already murky case.
Court records and interviews details brushes with the law involving Cummings as well as clashes over child custody with Crystal Sheffield, the biological mother of Haleigh and Ronald Jr.
Sheffield and Cummings never married, but she said the two were together between the times she was 14 and 19.
“I was 17 when I got pregnant with Haleigh,” said Sheffield, now 23.
Now living in Baker County, Sheffield had visitation every two weeks while Cummings had custody. Since her daughter’s disappearance, she and family members have set up a tent and shelter down the road from Cummings’ Green Lane mobile home.
Cummings, Croslin and their families are camped closer to the mobile home that still has not been turned back over to them by the Sheriff’s Office.
Cummings has had custody since 2005 when a magistrate said the children should live with him. He was employed and better able to provide health insurance to the children, the court said.
Sheffield said in the court record she had used cocaine a year before, a reason Cummings cited for wanting custody. He also said Haleigh had missed a dozen doctor’s appointments in the year before coming to live with him.
Sheffield has said Cummings was violent with her and court records show she once sought a protective order but then later asked that it be dismissed.
Cummings has said the fact that he has primary custody of the children shows he is a good parent.
But Cummings has had brushes with the law, including minor drug arrests, though most charges were dropped. In 2001 he was arrested after a man said he was threatened with a beating, according to court records.
Croslin said she met Cummings about six months ago when she was baby-sitting for a woman who had a child with Cummings.
Croslin said she was concerned the baby boy was not being cared for properly.
“I told him you need to get your son before something bad happens to him,” she said. Croslin said the two started talking. She was 16 at the time.
Her father, Hank Croslin Sr., told the Times-Union that Cummings told him he was 19 and later that he was 21.
Though Hank Croslin said he was angry at first about the lie, he said it is no longer an issue.
It is against Florida law for a person 24 or older to have relations with anyone 17 or younger, but investigators said they are not looking into the issue during the search for Haleigh. Find the little girl is their priority, they said.
The policy of the state Department of Children and Families also is to look first to the welfare of the children.
“If the children are being properly cared for and are not being abused, neglected or abandoned, then no action will be taken,” said department spokesman John Harrell.
He said the department has had “involvement” with the family in the past but could not under state confidentiality laws describe that interaction. Court records do show a review of the case over the custody issue.
For now, animosities have mostly been buried. At a prayer service for Haleigh on Tuesday, Misty Croslin, Ronald Cummings and Crystal Sheffield sat closely together at Dunns Creek Baptist Church, alternately holding Ronald Jr. as they hoped for the safe return of a brown-eyed, strawberry-blonde little girl.
dana.treen@jacksonville.com,
(904) 359-4091
