GREENBRIER — Samantha Mann, 23, pinned a button she had saved since middle school on a hot-pink T-shirt.
It read: Always loved, never forgotten.
In the middle was a picture of one of her best friends from those long-ago days of sleepovers, first crushes and burping contests.
The picture showed Kacie Woody, then 13, flashing her wide, signature grin.
On Monday evening, Mann - known by most as Sam - and her best friend, Jessica Bradford, met at Greenbrier High School’s football field to fondly recall those days.
Once, they were a trio.
Kacie. Sam. Jessica.
Their laughter echoed through school hallways.
Now, they are two.
Mann has a college degree in public relations and speech communication.
Bradford is 22, married and mom to a 3-year-old daughter. She works as a police dispatcher at the Greenbrier Police Department.
Those days of silly chatter and slumber parties are a thing of the past.
And Kacie died 10 years ago.
But Mann and Bradford will always remember.
So will the residents ofthis rural Faulkner County town.
Monday night, they joined Mann and Bradford at the field, clutching lanterns they would light and then release into the sky.
But this wasn’t a memorial, Mann told the crowd.
“Ten years ago, we were mourning the loss of her. Tonight, we celebrate the short life that she lived.”
Then Kacie’s dad spoke.
When his daughter died, Rick Woody was a Greenbrier police officer. Now, he’s a member of the criminal-investigation division.
He remembers the unspeakable pain of losing his daughter. But as the years passed, Rick Woody also began to remember the joy that Kacie brought him.
And so on Monday night, memories gushed from this normally reticent man.
He reminded everyone of Kacie’s big heart. Her big personality. And her laugh.
That girl had so loved to laugh.
DEC. 4, 2002
Kacie, Samantha and Jessica had been hoping for a snow day.
Instead, Sam sat numbly on the school bus, on the way to Greenbrier Middle School.
The night before, Rick Woody had called around 11 p.m. asking Sam if she knew where Kacie was.
“Pray for Kacie,” she told her mom after hanging up. “She’s missing.”
Sam, 13, stayed awake for the rest of the night, telephone in hand, repeatedly calling the Woody home.
But while Sam knew something bad had happened to Kacie, Jessica, 12, had no idea anything was amiss.
Until, that is, she arrived at Greenbrier Middle School.
In her first-period class, Jessica overheard two girls’ excited chatter:
“Kacie Woody’s been kidnapped!” one of them said.
“Y’all are lying,” Jessica snapped, then burst into tears.
The teacher sent Jessica to the counselor’s office.
When she walked in, Jessica encountered two girls sobbing.
Then Sam showed up.
She raced toward Jessica, and the two clung together in disbelief.
That morning, both girls talked to police. Sam told them she had been worried enough about Kacie’s Internet friendships that she’d talked to the school counselor only the day before.
The counselor, in turn, had lectured Kacie about trusting people she met online.
At first, Kacie was mad at Sam. But by the end of the school day, when the trio gathered outside to wait for their buses, Kacie laughed and goofed around with her two best friends, just as she always did.
The last time they ever saw Kacie, she was clambering aboard her bus.
“See ya!” she called.
Sam and Jessica recounted all of this for police.
But as they sat outside the office, comparing notes, the girls realized they had forgotten to tell the detectives about “Dave” - one of Kacie’s online friends.
The girls met again with police.
“You need to find Dave,” they said.
When police found “Dave,” he had shot himself in the head in a Conway storage unit.
They found Kacie’s body in the van parked inside.
“Dave” turned out to beDavid Fuller, a 47-year-old man from California who had pretended to be a teenager online.
Sam and Jessica, keeping vigil at Sam’s house, heard the news on television.
They huddled together and wept.
THE DAYS AFTER
The night before Kacie’s funeral, Sam and Jessica arrived at her visitation with yellow roses and a group picture of themselves making goofy faces. Sam tucked the photo under Kacie’s pillow.
Then she, Jessica and several other friends took turns placing roses in the coffin.
Notes written by the girls were attached to each stem.
Rick Woody approached them.
“Don’t quit coming around,” he said. “You’re my girls too now.” THE YEARS AFTER
Mann and Bradford did keep coming around.
On the day Kacie would have turned 16, Bradford found Rick Woody crying in his office at the school.
At that time, he was a resource officer there.
In this role, Woody made sure that the students at Greenbrier High School knew that online “friends” shouldn’t be trusted.
Mann and Bradford wanted to help. So they, along with 10 other students, formed a team.Each week, the team helped Woody put on presentations at area schools and churches.
When Bradford got married in 2009, Woody walked her down the aisle.
DEC. 3, 2012
At the Greenbrier football field, Mann and Bradford flanked Woody as he walked through the crowd.
They are “his girls” - these two friends who made sure the Woody home still sounded with laughter after Kacie’s death.
Monday night, there was more laughter, when a brisk wind made it difficult to light the lanterns that were meant to drift gracefully into the sky.
The crowd cheered as one, two, then three finally took flight. But the wind proved to be too much for the rest.
The evening took a comic turn as Mann, Bradford and other participants chased down lanterns that bobbled across the bleachers before descending onto the field.
“Oh no!” Bradford shrieked at one point, racing to divert a stray lantern that had drifted precariously close to a child.
She and Mann shook their heads ruefully as they repeatedly stomped out the flames of each fallen lantern.
Frustrating, yes, they said.
But Kacie would have loved it.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/04/2012