PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. — Haleigh Cummings was only 5 years old when she disappeared 11 years ago Monday from Putnam County.
While it's a sad day for her great-grandmother, Annette Sykes, her failing health makes it even harder. Sykes has incurable cancer and contacted First Coast News' Jessica Clark to make one more plea.
Cummings, her great-granddaughter, disappeared in the middle of the night from her Satsuma home in Putnam county in 2009, under the care of her father's girlfriend. The child has never been found.
"She was 5-and-a-half when she went missing," Sykes said.
She'd be 16 now.
Monday, tears rolling down her cheeks, Sykes said, "I have stage 4 cancer in both lungs and in my liver and I don't have long left here. Whoever knows something, I beg you to please tell us so I know what happened to my baby before I die."
She said she is running out energy and has too much pain to do basic things.
"I know I can't go on too long," Sykes told First Coast News. "They cannot cure what I have. It's in my bloodstream. No way to get rid of it."
She believes someone knows something about what happened to Cummings, and she is hoping a dying woman's call for help will prompt that person to speak.
"Please call and tell somebody," Sykes said. "You don't have to tell who you are. I don't care who you are. I just want you to tell us, so we can find Haleigh."
Various investigators who worked the case believe -- and so does Sykes -- that the Cummings' father's girlfriend at the time, Misty Croslin, knows what happened.
She and the child's father are both in jail on drug charges.
Long after the cameras left the girl's neighborhood and the investigators stopped pursuing the case every day, Sykes carried the torch to keep her great-granddaughter’s picture public.
For 11 years, Sykes has pleaded for someone to step up with information. This may be one of the last times she can.
"Please let me have some peace," she cried. "Give us our little girl back. Let me know what happened to her."