If you live in the Big Country and haven’t heard about the Hailey Dunn case, chances are you’ve been living under a rock. She’s been the focus of our newscasts for 3 weeks. Her face is on billboards and fliers statewide. Hundreds of people are looking for this 13 year old girl.
It dawned on me the other day that we’ve been so focused on the
search, the investigation, the specifics of the last day she was seen and the only named suspect in the case Shawn Adkins, her mother’s live-in boyfriend, that we may have lost sight of who Hailey Dunn is.By all accounts, she’s your typical teenage girl. One look around her room shows that. Pink walls, pillows that say “princess”, memorabilia from school tacked up on the walls.
It’s not a secret she is a cheerleader. She’s wearing her uniform in the picture on those billboards and fliers. And she loves to cheer.
But she also loves to play basketball, softball and volleyball and she's first chair saxophone player in the school band.
Her teachers say she’s a good student and very popular at Colorado Middle School.
Like most teenage girls, Hailey has a best friend, Heather. She loves having sleepovers. Heather says they like to stay up late listening to music and watching videos on YouTube.
We don’t know where Hailey is, but we know she isn’t doing any of the things she loves. Not cheering. Not playing basketball, watching videos.
She should be spending her evenings doing homework, playing with her siblings and friends, picking out what she’s going to wear to school tomorrow, practicing her cheers.
We all want answers. We are all praying for Hailey’s safe return. And if something bad has happened to her, we want the person responsible to be punished.
But mostly we just want this little girl to be able to be the fun-loving teenager we now know her to be. Every child deserves that.
If you know Hailey and want to share some stories about her, I'd love to hear them.
