Football standout missing, worst is feared

By Marcus K. Garner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Nick Turner was, by all accounts, an electrifying high school football player and a respectable young man. However, Turner's penchant for making bad choices has been blamed for his disappearance by the people closest to him, leaving them fearing the worst.

Turner, 26, went missing late Saturday night. Police continue to search for the former Washington High School and Mississippi State University running back, uncertain whether they will find him alive.

The one-time athlete's mother, Jennifer Dix, acknowledged Wednesday in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her son often ran with a criminal element. And she warned him there could be consequences.

"I told him, ‘If you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to end up dead or in jail,'" Dix said.

Specifically, Dix now believes her son's connection to drug dealing is the reason he disappeared and she fears those ties might have cost him his life.

"I can't sleep at night thinking somebody might be torturing him ... or that he might be lying somewhere with bullets in his back," Dix said.

On Saturday, Dix received a call shortly after 9 p.m. from one of Turner's friends, telling her that her son had been shot four times near a loft building on Murphy Avenue in southwest Atlanta.

When she and her younger son went to the industrial area to look for Turner, they encountered a warehouse, salvage yard and stretch of railroad tracks that back up to the MARTA north-south line, but not him.

They returned with police who found 20 spent shell casings and a rifle, but, again, no sign of Turner.

This was the son who Jennifer Dix was so proud of when he graduated from Washington High in 2002 and committed to a full athletic scholarship at Mississippi State. This was the former running back who was so good Washington coach Rodney Cofield called him "the Michael Jordan of high school football."

Yet Turner's reputation as a good guy and outstanding athlete gave way to crime. Turner led Mississippi State in rushing his sophomore year, but he did so after getting charged for passing counterfeit bills.

In an apparent drug deal gone bad in 2007, Turner was arrested and charged in DeKalb County the following year with armed robbery and murder for the death of Dermonde Broadus, and was out on bond.

Before the arrest, Cofield said Turner was still being contacted by professional and semi-pro football teams.

"He wanted to succeed," the coach said.

However, Turner admitted to his mother that he was "addicted to the streets."

"He told me one time, ‘Momma, I'm just not ready for (pro) football,'" she said. "He wasn't ready to give up the streets."

On Saturday night, Dix called Turner's phone and another man answered.

"Nick is dead," she was told by someone she knew only as "Cutter."

If true, Dix has been left to plead for those involved to tell her how to find her son or his remains.

"I just want to know where he is," Dix said. "I just want some peace and closure."