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Mike Simons for the New York Times
John Neace outside the Penn Villa apartment building in Crothersville, Ind., where his 10-year-old daughter, Katlyn Collman, apparently stumbled on someone with methamphetamine; her body was found in a lake days later. Mr. Neace hopes to buy the apartments, bulldoze them and build a playground in his daughter’s memory.

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null Remembering Katie
The death of a girl and the arrest of a local man for her murder have shaken a small Indiana town out of silence about the scourge of methamphetamine.

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RELATED

. My Addicted Son (February 6, 2005)



Associated Press
Katlyn Collman, shown in an undated photograph.


The New York Times

Too Late for Katie, Town Tackles a Drug's Scourge

By JODI WILGOREN

Published: February 10, 2005

CROTHERSVILLE, Ind., Feb. 9 - John Neace forces himself to pass by the run-down apartment buildings every day. Inside, the police say, Mr. Neace's 10-year-old daughter stumbled on someone with methamphetamine last month. Her drowned body was found five days later at a nearby creek, small hands tied tightly behind her back.

As dime and dollar donations poured in from around the corner and around the country for the little girl's burial, Mr. Neace, whose $14.75-an-hour factory job barely covers the $400 monthly rent on his trailer, had a thought: What if he could buy the hated buildings, bulldoze them and build a playground in their place?

"Katie may be gone, but she's going to live forever in this town," Mr. Neace, 35, said of his daughter, Katlyn Collman. "We're taking down one meth house - you probably can't take them all down, but it's sending a message. We're taking our town back."

Katie's Jan. 25 disappearance, and the Feb. 2 arrest of an unemployed high school dropout, have shaken this small town out of silence about the scourge of methamphetamine.

Like many similar communities across the nation's midsection, Crothersville, 40 miles north of Louisville and with a population of 1,541, has seen methamphetamine steadily seep into its streets.

When the roof of a house behind the funeral home exploded in December, a makeshift meth lab was found in the fire. Another lab, spitball distance from the school, was raided earlier last year. The uncle of the young man now facing charges of killing Katie wrote a letter to the town council two years ago beseeching the members to do something about drugs before someone got killed.

But many residents said they had been scared to report suspicions in a community where everyone seems somehow related. Others complained that the three-man police force too often looks the other way - the man who lived at the house behind the funeral home has yet to face charges, and two complaints about methamphetamine use at the dilapidated Penn Villa apartments in the days before Katie's death yielded no arrests.

Now, as people here comfort the families of the victim and of the suspect, stories are spilling out, in a town seemingly transformed.

The pastor who preached at Katie's funeral is organizing Crothersville's first-ever neighborhood watch. Shady characters no longer stalk the streets of the one-stoplight town, where ribbons of blue, Katie's favorite color, hang from utility poles and porches. Gone, too, are the bike-riding and dog-walking youngsters, now let outside to play only with their parents, or in groups.

"This town is not going to be known, and these people are not going to let it be known, for a murder," declared Terry Gray, the assistant chief of the volunteer fire department, who has pledges for $100,000 of the $400,000 he estimates will be needed to buy the Penn Villa apartments and build the park. "They're going to be known as a town that took a bad situation and made it something good."

But amid the pride in the prospect for change that the proposed playground represents, there is shame that it came to this.

"It's changed too late," said Misty Banks, who works at the Butcher Block convenience store, where she gave Reese's peanut butter cups and Popsicles to Katie even when she could not pay. "They've known it's been going on this whole time, and they have to wait until a 10-year-old's dead?"

Katie, whose surname is that of her mother because she was born before her parents were married, was a fourth grader who loved animals and the Disney Channel. She came home that Tuesday afternoon bubbling about a pajama party planned at school the next day, her mother, Angela, said.

And at 3:10 p.m., Katie headed to the Dollar General store a few blocks away to pick up some toilet paper. She apparently swung by the People's Bank to grab a lollipop, and stopped at the Penn Villa apartments to tell a resident that a dog had been hit by a train on the adjacent track.

She never came back.


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