Those who love former football star Nick Turner believe he is dead. He’s not missing, they say. He most certainly didn’t disappear on his own.
“I know my son. He’s just not going to leave. He’s going to call somebody,” Jennifer Dix said Friday.
“I go home every day waiting for the phone to ring,” said Beverly Adams, mother of three of Turner’s five children. “He left behind kids. He’s got a family that loves him to death. If it’s his time [to die] just let us know. This is somebody’s daddy, child, brother.”
Turner’s family hasn’t seen him since Aug. 28, the day one of his friends told Dix her son was shot and killed during a drug deal.
They hoped making a plea to the media would get them some answers. His mother, grandmother and brother and Adams and her mother and grandmother begged for information.
Atlanta police consider Turner a missing person.
“He may have been shot,” said Sgt. Tommy Uhlis, who is in APD’s missing persons unit. “However, the reports cannot be confirmed right now. It’s being investigated as a missing persons case.”
Turner, 26, was a Parade All-American running back at Washington High School who later led Mississippi State University in rushing. But then-Mississippi State coach Sylvester Croom dismissed him for off-field incidents, including being charged with passing counterfeit bills at a Starkville nightclub. Turner finished his career at Murray State.
His mother admits his life was going in the wrong direction and she had warned him about making bad choices and she believes going to the warehouse that night was another bad decision.
The details of Turner’s disappearance are scant and strange.
He went to a hard-to-find parking lot in southwest Atlanta to buy “weed” with a man from New Orleans known only as Cutter, according to his family. Police confirmed Turner was with someone but they have declined to give a name.
Police said it was between 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. when Turner and his friend got to the side and rear of a warehouse on Murphy Avenue that houses storage space, a tire store and an artist's studio. Police said in the days after the incident that witnesses reported that Turner approached somebody who supposedly was selling pot, shots were fired and Turner was hit multiple times.
A third man known as C.P. also was there but Turner’s mother is not clear why.
Around 9 p.m. Dix got a call from one of Turner's friends who said Cutter had called to report her son was dead. An hour later she was told to meet Cutter at a gas station on Sylvan Road and from there they would be taken to the warehouse.
“The place he took us to looked spooky, like it’s ready for Halloween. It’s an abandoned building,”Dix said, adding that she had heard reports he encountered “people from California who make people disappear.”
There was no body.
Dix said C.P. handed over her son’s wallet and a week later Cutter gave police his cell phone.
“We have not located the victim so this case is being worked as a missing persons,” Lt. Paul Guerrucci, commander of the Atlanta Police Department homicide unit, said two weeks after the incident. "We can't work it as a homicide. But none of the family members have heard from him."
Police, alerted when one of Turner’s relatives “flagged down” a cruiser, found an AK-47 and some spent shells, from a handgun.
Crime scene technicians recovered a small drop of blood and search dogs could not pick up a scent that would lead them to Turner. Police helicopters with equipment to spot heat from a body found nothing, Guerrucci said.
Dix said she believes her son's connection to drug dealing is the reason he disappeared but she said a list of goals for the year that she found in his wallet told her he wanted to do things right.
“Nick is a good person,” Dix said. “For whatever reason for people thinking anything different, they don’t know him.”
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