A 17-Year-Old Was Killed In Her Home. Was It A Burglary Gone Wrong Or A Hate Crime?

“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,” said Amy Fletcher, Maggie Long's theater teacher.

Dive deep into true crime cases and follow the latest headlines with HuffPost’s Suspicious Circumstances newsletter. Sign up here.

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.