Latasha Norman's Stepdad

By the time we got to Yazoo, Mississippi, I get another call from Marquis. And he says that he's with the campus police and he's filed a missing person report. They did search the school at that time. The dorms and stuff. When we got there, nobody knew. Nobody seen anything. She just disappeared.

I told her to go to the campus police and report to have it documented.

We had been there all that day on the 14th, and we hadn't got no answers.

When I first appealed for help on the Jackson State campus, they set up where I could speak. The sheriff there did. And it was media there from everywhere. If you can hear us, we want to let you know that we love you. And that we're not going to stop until we know something. Because it happened on a black college campus. So it draw even more attention. But I'm not shy to mic.

It looks so lifelike.

Even before that happened, I had took a media class. It was almost like God had prepared me for this. I went on every talk show, radio show, TV show, news show, anybody that would listen to me.

Tasha had a class at one o'clock and she got out of class at 2.20 and she just disappeared in thin air. She never made it back to her dorm, she never made it to her car.

I was willing to be a man and stand up and fight for them, protect them. It's my job.

I raised Latasha. And I told them when I first came here that I was not going to leave Jackson until I found my child. I missed Tasha. My wife missed Tasha. And we hope that they'll hear something from her real soon.

We hadn't got no answers. The police, well, they really weren't accomplishing much.

They interviewed me, the investigators, and they wanted to know who we thought might have had some involvement in it. I told them, check out her new boyfriend. After she became missing, I became very suspicious of him. I didn't trust him. He jumped the gun and filed a missing person report for we can't even get to town.

I had told him I was on the way and I was like, why you didn't give us the opportunity to get there and do this? It seemed like he was hiding something. He seemed like he was nervous. When he brought her home, my baby son had a game that night. And so she come home to watch her baby brother play in the ball game. Then he introduce her to her new boyfriend.

And there was a little disagreement between him and Latasha's cousin. After the game, he wanted to go back. So I thought maybe him and her got to arguing or something on the way back home, and he might have tried to retaliate against her or whatever.

Marquis was telling me that the FBI was questioning him. And I told him I knew. And me and him had some choice words. And I told him if I found out that he had something to do with it, it wasn't going to be nothing nice. Our relationship really kind of ended right then.

That's the first time we knew that an incident had happened. That she had filed this report against Mr. Cole. So she never did tell us. I mean, I cried. I was hurt. I couldn't believe it.

At that time, we thought she had broken the relationship off with him because she had found out that He had another young lady pregnant.

LaTosha Norman is my stepdaughter, but I consider her as my daughter because I raised her from a child.

We had hope. We had faith. We had belief. We was determined to stay in Jackson until we find her.

All we could do then was just come home. Because there was nothing else in Jackson that we could do.

I hate to this day that she got tangled up with this young man. My wife was so broken. I was just bitter, just disappointed. And to be honest with you, I wasn't pleasant. It didn't take much to make me go off. And that wasn't nice, I thought that was ugly. I had to ask God to take this bitterness, anger from me.

Mr. Cole was still trying to say it was an accident.

LaTosha, she never exposed that to us. She kept it here. I think she was ashamed of it.

That's the only time I seen him show emotion. Then them big crocodile tears come down. He apologized to us, but the damage had been done.

Well, we went before the state Supreme Court. God has granted us this victory two years ago. And we have faith and we believe that he won't reverse it. And they ruled in his favor, saying that it was a mistrial because the judge didn't put consideration for manslaughter on the table for the jury to choose from.

Stanley Cole was offered a free trial. So me and my wife had to go back to Jackson and meet the DA. Well, we just wanted justice, but we didn't want to go back through the trial. She didn't want to go back through it, and I didn't either. And on the way down there, we had this conversation. We gonna offer him a 40-year plea. No parole, no probation.

Her dream was to go to Jackson State. And their name was known as Jackson State the Normans.

And he accepted it, because it was better than the deal he had at first. And I realized I had to forgive him. I had to release him in order to release myself.

It ain't all been bad. A lot of good has come out of this, man. But you got to take the bitter with the sweet.

God want to use LaTosha Light to shine a light on teen domestic violence. Domestic violence is nothing new. See, for so long, this is like a taboo in our community. People don't like to talk about it, but we have to talk about it.

Well, after her death, they wanted to do a walk in her name. And we've done it for the last 15 years. All the proceeds goes back into the LaTosha Norman Center.

Life has had a great impact. Her legacy lived on, man. She was an angel of God. She's one of his angels.

I would tease her. I would call her Miss Jackson State. She had no problem being admitted there.

Jackson is approximately an hour and a half from Greenville.

On orientation day, after we had moved her in, I know she was ready for us to go, but my wife wasn't ready to go. She wanted to mop. She wanted to wipe everything down. She wanted to make the bed. That was her excuse to linger around, you know. My wife had had a child before she graduated from high school. She had to work. LaTosha was living her dream. And it was almost like

My wife living her dream through LaTosha. LaTosha was getting an opportunity to do a lot of things that my wife never had an opportunity to do. So we encouraged LaTosha to excel.

He bought her a life-size teddy bear and gave it to her and I think he stole her heart that way.

Latasha, her dream was to go to Jackson State.

I think she wanted to make something out of him. And so she helped him get into school down there and she was taking up accounting and he was taking up criminal justice.

She was thriving like a peacock.

She wanted us to meet Marquis. And so he brought her home to watch her baby brother play in the ball game the 10th of November. We seemed to be all right. But they went back that night, and that was the last time we saw her alive.

Every night, my wife would talk Latasha back to her dorm. This particular night, she couldn't get Latasha. When we woke up November 14, 2007, the phone rang. It was her new boyfriend on the phone. Because my wife had called him, asked him had he seen Tasha. And he said he hadn't seen her since the night before. And she handed me the phone and I talked to him.