Thu, Jun. 23, 2005
PB High School grad prays her daughter is still alive
Associated Press
PINE BLUFF, Ark. - The mother of Natalee Holloway, an Alabama teenager missing for three weeks in Aruba, says she prays that her daughter has only been kidnapped, and is still alive somewhere on the Caribbean island.
"Isn't it strange that I should be praying that my daughter has been kidnapped?" Beth Holloway Twitty said from her hotel room in Aruba, in a telephone interview Thursday with the Pine Bluff Commercial.
Twitty is the former Beth Reynolds, a 1978 graduate of Pine Bluff High School, and her mother, Ann Reynolds, still lives in Pine Bluff. Twitty, a speech therapist, and her husband live in Mountain Brook, Ala., near Birmingham, with Natalee, 18, and their 16-year-old son, Matt.
Twittty has been in Aruba since shortly after her daughter disappeared during the early morning hours of May 30. The teenager was on a high school graduation trip with 124 other students.
While a search for Holloway continues, Aruba police have made several arrests in connection with the case, including a 17-year-old Dutch youth, two Surinamese brothers, a party-boat disc-jockey and, on Thursday, the father of the Dutch teenager.
Also in Aruba to help with the search for the Alabama teenager are her father, Dave Holloway, and his wife, Robin, of Meridian, Miss., and a host of family and friends who have traveled to and from the island at various times. Dave Holloway is a graduate of Jonesboro Westside High School in Arkansas.
Twitty said she spends her days walking the streets and beaches of Aruba and pleading for information from anyone who will listen. She hands them prayer cards and bracelets with a message of hope for Natalee.
She carries notebooks in which she records comments and information from the people she encounters, she said - anything she deems important to her daughter's case. The people, Twitty said, have been very supportive.
She finally slows down around 1 or 2 a.m., she said, and wakes before 5 a.m. Twitty said she's driven by a need to attain justice.
"I get mad, but it's almost like you have to play the cards you're dealt," she said. "The government here and the laws are so different from the U.S. I just have to do what I can, when I can."
And I pray with Beth.