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At around 7 p.m. on Dec. 1, 2017, Park County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a call of a house fire at a home in rural Bailey, Colorado. A witness had called 911 to report that at least one man was causing damage on the property, a 27-acre ranch in the mountains between Denver and Breckenridge.
Firefighters put out the blaze, but as they investigated the scene, they discovered the charred remains of one of the home’s residents, 17-year-old Maggie Long. Her death would be classified as a homicide and later, a possible hate crime. Seven years since the fire, no one knows who killed her or why — a tragedy that rocked not just her family, but the small community where the teen was already leaving her mark.
It had been a typical Friday evening for Maggie, a high school senior at Platte Canyon High School who was active in theater and community service. She was in charge of a concert being held at her high school that night, but returned home to get more water and cookies for the audience she was expecting, Sheriff Tom McGraw said at a news conference in 2019. Maggie told her friends she would be right back, but she was never seen again.
Her friends and family immediately began to worry, with posts on social media and a local community forum seeking information and asking people to look out for the teen.
“I remember being up all that night on the phone with everyone saying, ‘Have you seen Maggie? You know what’s happening to Maggie?’ Because at that point, they were saying that Maggie was missing, and so we were all very entrenched,” Amy Fletcher, Maggie’s theater teacher at the Venue Theatre Company in Conifer, told HuffPost in an interview.
Earlier this month on the anniversary of Maggie’s death, authorities once again asked anyone with information to come forward.
“It’s a very disturbing sort of thing to be living in a place where something so horrific could happen, and we have no idea why or how, or if it could ever happen again, right?” Fletcher said. “That’s something that we all have to live with.”
Evidence at the crime scene allowed investigators to piece together what happened to Maggie before she was killed. And over the years, though no suspects have been named, multiple theories have sprung up around why her home was targeted.
As members of their family were trying to figure out where Maggie was on Dec. 1, 2017, her sister Connie Long told Colorado Public Radio that a tenant who lived in an upstairs unit of their home was texting her that he was hearing loud noises. After not finding Maggie at one of their family’s restaurants or the high school, she told Colorado Public Radio she went home around 7:20 p.m., only to find firefighters in the driveway and smoke in the air.
Authorities ultimately determined that when Maggie arrived at the house earlier that evening, she walked in on at least three men who had broken in, and a physical altercation took place between Maggie and the burglars. McGraw said the assailants spent a significant amount of time inside the house where Maggie was “purposely set on fire and burned alive” to conceal their crimes.
Several items were stolen, including a Beretta handgun, an AK-47-style rifle, 2,000 rounds of ammunition, a green safe and jade figurines.
According to FOX affiliate KDVR, Maggie’s body was formally identified six days after the house fire. Months later, in May 2018, Sgt. Greg Jones, the lead detective investigating the case, determined that Long’s house was targeted by the suspects.
“We feel strongly that whoever did this probably had a strong feeling that there were items of particular value to them that would have been in the Long household, and that’s why they targeted that house,” Jones said.
Authorities released sketches of the three men, based on witness descriptions. One man was seen at the Long property, while the two others were seen in a van leaving the property that day. FBI spokeswoman Amy Meyer told local NBC affiliate KUSA that a fourth person may be involved as well.
“It could be a male or a female, but we believe there is possibly a fourth person that is either involved in the burglary on Dec. 1, 2017, or that might be a key witness that we would like to talk to,” Meyer said.
Few other details have been publicized. Just three days after the house fire, a local judge issued a gag order preventing authorities from releasing any further information. Lynna Long, Maggie’s other sister, told Colorado Public Radio that her family was not allowed to be anywhere near the home for days after the fire because it was a crime scene.
“We got a tour of the house by the sheriff, basically showing us where the damage was. And we saw just the damage in the garage as well. Because the perpetrators were trying to set multiple starting points of the fire around the house,” Lynna Long said.
Maggie’s case was reclassified by the FBI as a potential hate crime in 2021, and a multi-agency task force took on the investigation.
“It’s an option we have never explored before, but we’re looking at now to see if it is a real possibility,” McGraw, the Park County sheriff, told KDVR at the time.
According to Colorado Public Radio, Maggie’s family immigrated to the United States decades ago and was one of only a few Asian families living in the area. Her parents were financially successful, running several Chinese restaurants at the time and investing in real estate.
“They worked hard. They worked in the restaurant all their lives and they built everything from scratch,” Benjamin Cheang, a family friend of the Longs, told ABC affiliate KMGH.
The family sold their home years after Maggie’s death. Cheang told KMGH it was their dream home and where Maggie grew up.
“It took me a long time to convince them that life needs to move on,” Cheang said.
Connie Long told Colorado Public Radio that Maggie’s sudden death was devastating for the family.
“My parents’ retirement from the restaurant business was kind of in-the-making, but Maggie’s death really catapulted that process. The night that she died, they stopped working and they did not return to the restaurant,” she told Colorado Public Radio. “It’s been a huge change in both of my parents. …I don’t think they’ll ever truly heal from the death of our sister.”
Despite authorities offering up a $75,000 reward for information leading to the three suspects’ arrests, the case remains unsolved. A spokesperson for the Colorado Bureau of Investigations told HuffPost that the Maggie Long task force is still active and composed of the CBI, Park County Sheriff’s Office, ATF and FBI. They say the task force meets once every few months.
The aftermath of Maggie’s death left people in Bailey, an unincorporated community of about 9,000, and the surrounding area in shock, according to Fletcher. Many continue to feel a sense of frustration that no suspect has been caught or named.
“It just seems so cruel to not be able to know what happened, and to have something like that happen in a small community,” Fletcher said. “ I mean, it only makes you wonder about who your neighbors are and what’s going on.”
Fletcher described Bailey and neighboring Conifer as the type of towns where everyone knew each other, and where the theater is a second home to many young people living there, including Maggie. She remembered the girl fondly as a “compassionate person who wanted to always be of service.”
“Maggie would come into the room and everyone would feel better, and I know that seems very cliche, but she brought with her this energy of taking life by the hands and running with it,” Fletcher said.
The theater created a tribute video with clips of Maggie’s performances and placed a plaque in the lobby of the theater in her memory. Fletcher told HuffPost they continue to give out an award named after Maggie to one of their students each year.
According to Fletcher, moving on from Maggie’s death is not just hard, but impossible. She believes finding those responsible might “bring some sense to something that’s so senseless.”
“I think about Maggie every day because I walk into the theater and I see her picture, and she deserves to be at peace,” Fletcher said. “And her family deserves to find some solace.”