A Brick Against the Screen Door: The Disappearance of Haleigh Cummings

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

February 26, 2026

Haleigh Ann-Marie Cummings was five years old, a small girl with blonde hair, brown eyes, and Turner syndrome that required regular hormone treatments and specialist care, when she disappeared from her family's home in Satsuma, Florida, sometime between the night of February 9 and the early morning hours of February 10, 2009. She had gone to bed around 8 p.m. in a modest trailer in the Hermit's Cove area, watched that night by her father's girlfriend of five months. By the time her father returned home after 3 a.m., Haleigh was gone, the back door left several inches ajar, a cinder block propping open the screen. More than fifteen years later, despite national attention, an alleged confession implicating a specific man in a specific location, and a woman who failed four separate polygraph examinations, Haleigh Cummings has never been found, and no one has ever been charged in connection with her disappearance.

A Life Already Marked by Medical Need

Haleigh lived with a diagnosis of Turner syndrome, a genetic condition that in her case required regular hormone treatments along with ongoing cardiology and endocrinology care, the kind of medical needs that meant she was already a known, closely tracked patient within the local healthcare system well before she ever went missing. She lived with her father, Ronald Lemyles Cummings, who had gained full custody of her in December 2005 following a separation from Haleigh's biological mother, Crystal Sheffield, roughly four years before Haleigh disappeared. Haleigh continued to visit her mother every other weekend under this arrangement, while living primarily with her father and her younger brother, then three years old, in the family home.

A New Girlfriend in the House

By early 2009, Ronald was in a relationship with Misty Janette Croslin, who had moved into the family home and had been living there as his girlfriend for approximately five months by the time Haleigh disappeared. On the night of February 9, Misty put both children to bed and went to sleep in the same room as Haleigh around 10 p.m. Ronald arrived home sometime after 3 a.m. on February 10, at which point Misty told him she had just woken up to discover Haleigh missing from her bed. The back door of the home was found several inches ajar, with the screen door propped open using a cinder block, a detail investigators would return to repeatedly in the months and years that followed, since it suggested either genuine forced entry or a staged scene meant to look that way. Police found no clear, unambiguous signs of forced entry at the home. A 911 call went out at 3:37 that morning, and an extensive search of the surrounding area in the days that followed produced nothing.

A Story That Kept Changing

From very early in the investigation, suspicion settled heavily on Misty Croslin. Investigators would later state publicly that she failed four separate polygraph examinations along with one voice stress test, and that she changed the specific details of her account of that night multiple times over the course of questioning. Despite this mounting official skepticism, Misty and Ronald married just one month after Haleigh disappeared, with Ronald later explaining that the decision had been made in part because it was something Haleigh herself, before she vanished, had reportedly wished to see happen. The marriage did not last. Ronald filed for divorce roughly six months later, citing the overwhelming stress the situation had placed on their relationship, and the divorce was finalized by that October.

A Man Who Came and Went That Same Day

Investigators also looked closely at Joseph "Joe" Overstreet, a Tennessee resident who happened to be in Florida at the time of Haleigh's disappearance and who had visited the Cummings home on February 9, leaving several hours before Haleigh was reported missing that night. Misty and her own brother, Hank Thomas "Tommy" Croslin Jr., would later accuse Overstreet directly of kidnapping Haleigh and drowning her in the St. Johns River. Overstreet has never been formally charged in the case, nor has he ever been officially named a suspect by investigators, though he was interviewed at length. He has consistently denied any involvement in Haleigh's disappearance.

A Cousin's Account of a Rifle and a Rage

The most detailed and specific version of what may have happened to Haleigh came in 2010, through Tommy Croslin's own attorney, who described an account his client had given him. According to this version of events, Tommy and his cousin Joe Overstreet had gone to the Cummings home the night Haleigh disappeared so that Overstreet could borrow an automatic rifle for deer hunting. When the rifle was not available, Overstreet became angry, and according to the account Tommy reportedly gave, Haleigh was strangled inside the home as a result of whatever happened next. Tommy said that he and Overstreet then drove Haleigh's body to a boat ramp in Putnam County and dumped it into the St. Johns River. Some observers following the case at the time found the stated motive, anger over a missing hunting rifle, difficult to square with the severity of what supposedly followed, and speculated that the actual underlying circumstances of that night may have involved something else entirely that never came fully to light.

Divers in the River, Nothing Found

Acting on this account, investigators conducted an extensive search of the St. Johns River in April 2010, focused on an area around a boat dock roughly five miles from the Cummings home in Satsuma. Misty herself was brought to the dock as part of this search effort. Divers worked the river for several days, but the search ultimately turned up no physical evidence connected to Haleigh, and no remains were ever recovered from the location Tommy had described.

A Brother's Account, Doubted for His Age

Haleigh's own younger brother, who was three years old at the time and present in the home the night she disappeared, told investigators that a man dressed in black had come to their home and taken his sister. Given his age at the time, authorities have treated this account with appropriate caution, unable to determine how much of it reflected an actual memory of that night versus something else entirely, but it has remained part of the broader record of conflicting and unresolved narratives surrounding what happened.

A Mother's Own Troubled Record

Haleigh's biological mother, Crystal Sheffield, was not free of her own complications during this period. She had an ongoing custody dispute with Ronald prior to Haleigh's disappearance, and later admitted to having used cocaine and to having missed several of Haleigh's medical appointments during periods when Haleigh was in her care. After Haleigh disappeared, Sheffield, through her attorney, in turn accused Ronald of child abuse and neglect, adding yet another layer of accusation and counter-accusation to a case that has never lacked for conflicting narratives among the adults involved.

Legal Troubles That Followed Both Adults

In January 2010, both Ronald Cummings and Misty Croslin were arrested on unrelated drug trafficking charges. Misty pleaded no contest and received a 25 year sentence, with a release date currently set for June 2031. Ronald pleaded guilty to his own charges and received 15 years, ultimately being released in October 2022. His freedom did not last long. He was re-arrested that same December on charges including drug possession and resisting an officer, pleading no contest to those charges in November 2024 and remaining incarcerated in the Putnam County Jail as of the most recent updates on the case.

Sixteen Years and Counting

Haleigh's disappearance remains classified by the Putnam County Sheriff's Office as a homicide investigation, one of seven unsolved AMBER Alert cases still open in the state of Florida. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an updated age progression image in September 2024 showing what Haleigh might look like at 21 years old, a quiet acknowledgment of just how much time has passed since she vanished as a five year old girl. Crime Stoppers of Northeast Florida continues to offer a 15,000 dollar reward for information leading to a resolution. Haleigh's great-grandmother, Annette Sykes, died in May 2023, having expressed that her final wish before passing was simply to learn what had actually happened to Haleigh, a wish that, like so much else in this case, went unfulfilled.

Still Missing

More than fifteen years after a cinder block propped open a screen door in a small Florida trailer, Haleigh Ann-Marie Cummings has never been found, and despite a specific account naming a specific man and a specific stretch of river, no one has ever been charged in connection with her disappearance or presumed death. The Putnam County Sheriff's Office has stated plainly that it does not forget her case, even as the adults who were in that home the night she vanished have each, in their own separate ways, moved through years of arrests, marriages, divorces, and prison sentences for crimes that had nothing to do with the little girl none of them have ever fully accounted for.

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