The mother of Morgan Nick, the 6-year-old girl whose disappearance 17 years ago is one of Arkansas’ enduring mysteries, said a Louisiana woman who attempted to impersonate her daughter inflicted “devastating” emotional injury on her family, but she hopes the woman will turn her life around. Colleen Nick said Tonya Renee Smith is definitely not her daughter.
Nick said she hopes Smith, who is about eight months pregnant, can change her life, not just for herself but for her soon-tobe-born child.
“I hope she ... gets back on her feet and becomes a good parent,” Nick said. “I’d like to see her fight for her daughter, just like I am fighting for mine.”
Smith, 24, of Elmer, La., pleaded guilty to felony computer fraud in exchange for a sentence of six years on probation and a $2,500 fine. She’ll eventually be returned to Rapides Parish, La., to serve that sentence, her attorney Bill Simpson said.
She admitted in court Thursday to trying to pass herself off as Morgan Nick to acquire the girl’s birth certificate over the Internet from the Arkansas Department of Health’s vital statistics division. Authorities say she is a probation absconder from Louisiana.
Smith spoke quietly and only in answer to Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson’s questions about whether she understood the proceeding and wanted to plead guilty. Deputy prosecutor Tonia Acker told the judge that Smith had hurt Morgan Nick’s family.
“The state would like her to know her conduct has been devastating for the family,” Acker told the judge.
Smith replied yes when the judge asked if she understood what she had done. Johnson urged Smith to change her life.
“You need to take this seriously,” the judge told her, saying that prosecutors could have sent her to prison. The charge carries a six-year maximum sentence.
Prosecutors said Colleen Nick endorsed the sentence, and Nick spent more than an hour sitting in the front row of the courtroom, keenly watching Smith while waiting for the case to go before the judge.
After the hearing, Nick said she is sure that Smith is not her daughter, who was abducted from a park in Alma in June 1995.
“She doesn’t look like anyone in our family,” she said of Smith.
When she learned last year that police were searching for a woman who had tried to get her daughter’s birth certificate, Nick said, she was briefly hopeful that the woman would be Morgan. But, she said, the state police agents who arrested Smith immediately realized that she was not the missing girl. Nick said Smith’s actions were upsetting because she could have derailed the ongoing investigation into her daughter’s disappearance by assuming the girl’s identity.
“The only thing left is her identity,” Nick said. “For her to steal the only thing [Morgan] had left was certainly devastating.”
She commended the Health Department for catching on to Smith’s scheme in time to block her.
“I think it was amazing that the people at the Health Department caught that and acted so quickly,” she said.
Nick has become an advocate for families of missing children and established the Morgan Nick Foundation, named after her daughter, to provide resources and education about abducted children.
The foundation has a website at morgannickfoundation.com.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 03/01/2013