A year since Haleigh Cummings vanished, Ronald and Misty lost their way long ago * By Dana Treen
* Story updated at 4:49 PM on Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010
MARKING A YEAR
Events recognizing the one-year mark of Haleigh Cummings' disappearance have taken place or are planned for this week. Saturday, a Hope for Haleigh Prayer Vigil was held at Celebration Park in Glen St. Mary.
On Wednesday, a candlelight vigil is planned for Satsuma at Tyler and Monroe streets near where she vanished. Those interested in information about the vigil can contact the Justice Coalition in Jacksonville at (904) 783-6312.
Ronald Cummings was already a volatile man with a drug-related past when he met Misty Croslin, a defiant, barely educated teenager who moved in nearby.
Before they came to define the troubling story of Cummings' 5-year-old daughter, the pair now jailed on trafficking charges lived in a world surrounded by drugs and marked by mistrust, family and others recalled in interviews.
Haleigh disappeared from southern Putnam County a year ago Wednesday.
In the years leading up to that night, Cummings, now 26, had fathered three children and been arrested on drug charges but escaped prosecution.
Croslin was a Michigan transplant who quit going to school in the sixth grade and ran off to New Jersey at 15.Now Cummings and Croslin are awaiting arraignment on the drug charges after undercover investigators orchestrated a series of narcotics buys in December and January that also netted a friend of Croslin's, one of her brothers and a cousin of Cummings.
The arrests end nearly a year that was both sad because of Haleigh and tawdry in the lives it exposed to a national audience.
Ronald CummingsCummings and his 17-year-old girlfriend had been together for a short time when Haleigh disappeared. They'd met months earlier in their Satsuma neighborhood and seen each other at the school bus stop at the end of Tyler Street where Haleigh was dropped off with Croslin's nephew.
They had also talked when Croslin baby-sat Cummings' youngest son, who lived with a former girlfriend. Croslin warned Cummings he needed to gain custody of the baby because she said the child's mother was a drug abuser who would sometimes disappear and abandon the boy with whoever had him.
Soon Croslin was baby-sitting for Haleigh and Cummings' 3-year-old son, Ronald Jr.
The two became a couple but the relationship was rocky on the Monday night that Haleigh went missing.
Croslin spent the weekend partying, although she was home by the time Cummings went to work Monday evening. But Cummings was angry and repeatedly called her phone then called her brother that night, demanding to know where she was when he couldn't get her on the phone.
Anger and a sense of remoteness had marked Cummings for years, said his grandmother Annette Sykes, who reared him and his sister until Sykes' husband became debilitated by Alzheimer's.
Annette and Kirby Sykes had guardianship of the two children beginning when Ronald was 3. He moved out as his grandfather became increasingly ill and was back with his mother, Teresa Neves, in Sumter County by the time he was a young teenager.
After Cummings graduated from high school in Leesburg, he and his girlfriend moved back to Putnam County. They went to his grandparents in Welaka, where his girlfriend became pregnant, but Cummings had changed, his grandmother said.
"He just had a dirty mouth," she said. "He was very disrespectful."
She attributed his ill manners to a bad crowd but found that as her husband - the man Cummings called "Daddy" - worsened and died, her grandson changed, too.
"He doesn't really want anybody to be close to him, I don't think," she said.
Cummings never saw much of his birth father, who lives in Putnam County, she said.
"Everything Kirby did at home, Ronald was right with him," Sykes said. "Every step Kirby took."
Cummings was never the same after his death in January 2002, she said.
From jail, Cummings said his grandfather had been a guiding force in his life.
"He taught me the basics, you know, be good to your women and your children," he said. "Work."
He said he learned right from wrong from his grandfather, and the importance of respect.
"I'm sure he wouldn't be happy I'm in here, that's for sure," he said.
His most serious arrests started after high school.
In October 2001 he was arrested after a Crescent City man said he was threatened at a stoplight and told he would be killed.
He was charged with drug possession in 2002 and 2004, both times after drugs were found with him in cars.
Charges were never prosecuted, according to court records.
Crystal SheffieldIn Leesburg, Cummings had lived with his mother and Crystal Sheffield, a
14-year-old who came from Putnam County where she met the year-older Cummings.
Sheffield, who would be the mother of Haleigh and Ronald Jr., left school in the ninth grade to be home-schooled but never went any further.
Her mother, Marie Griffis, said her daughter was supposed to visit Cummings in Leesburg for a weekend but never came home. Mother and daughter were not often in touch for the next two years, and Griffis said she sometimes did not know where Sheffield was.
"When Crystal was with him, she didn't have much contact with me," Griffis said. "She never called me. When I called her, she didn't return my calls."
Sheffield, who now lives in Baker County on property beside her mother and stepfather, said drugs including pot and cocaine were part of the lifestyle she and Cummings shared while they were together.
She said Cummings only worked some and the two lived with his mother until they moved in with Sykes in Putnam before Haleigh was born.
"He just didn't like my family," Sheffield said. "He just kind of kept me away."
Sheffield became pregnant with Haleigh at 17. She and Cummings never married but lived with Sykes until their son was born 18 months after Haleigh.
Life with Cummings was difficult, Sheffield said. He was controlling and could be erratic, sometimes with guns.
"I've watched him put a gun in his mouth in front of me and Haleigh," she said.
After separating in 2005, Cummings was given custody of Haleigh and Ronald Jr. because he had a job with health insurance.
Misty CummingsCummings and the two children were living together when he met Croslin in 2008.
Sykes' first impression of the petite teen came from the children.
"The kids adored her and she seemed to adore them back," Sykes said. "I mean they'd cry to go back to her."
Sykes said she saw another side of her grandson's girlfriend in the months after Haleigh vanished, when Cummings, Croslin and Ronald Jr. moved in with her.
"You can't threaten her or do anything to her emotionally or mentally that will affect her," Sykes said. "She doesn't have the ability."
Sykes said even repeated interrogations by investigators had little impact."When the sheriff's department was threatening her and doing all their doings and stuff, it didn't faze her," she said.Sykes said Croslin's childhood may have dulled her emotionally.
"She basically was here, there and yonder," Sykes said. "I don't reckon she knew from one day to the next where she was going to be."
Croslin was born in Michigan, but the family of five moved to where her father, Hank Croslin Sr., could find drywall work, her parents said. They spent time in Tennessee, her mother's home state, and Colorado before moving to Florida.
When their daughter was in the sixth grade, they were living in Flagler County.
"I'd send her to the bus stop," her mother, Lisa Croslin, said. "She'd never get on the bus. If it was a day she wanted to go, she'd go. If it was a day she didn't want to go, she would hide."
"She can't read," her father said. "She was behind in class just like all of us."
Reading disabilities run in the family, he said.
"I can't read at all," he said.
At about 15, Misty bought a bus ticket under a false name and moved to New Jersey with a boyfriend. After several months and with the help of a social worker, she was found and brought home.About that time, the Croslins moved to Putnam.
Her father said she began hanging out with Kristina "Nay Nay" Prevatt and Amber Brooks, who is the mother of Cummings' other son.
Both Prevatt and Brooks have drug arrest histories. The weekend before Haleigh disappeared, Misty was with Prevatt. "That's where all the trouble started, hanging around Nay Nay and Amber," her father said.
He said he couldn't convince her to distance herself from the new crowd. Misty was more trouble than the Croslins' two sons, he said.
"She was the wildest one," he said. "She was."
On Feb. 9, the night after Croslin returned to Cummings' mobile home from the weekend of partying, Sykes dropped by. She said she was upset that Croslin had gone off and left her grandson without anyone to watch over the two kids.
"I was mad because Ronald let her come back," she said. "But it's his house. There wasn't nothing I could do about it other than be mad."By the next morning, Haleigh was gone.
dana.treen@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4091
In an earlier version, it was stated that Cummings repeatedly called Misty Croslin's brother the night Haleigh disappeared. Instead, he called Misty Croslin's phone several times and her brother once.http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-02-07/story/a_year_since_haleigh_cummings_vanished_ronald_and_misty_lost_their_way_l
