Dateline: Missing In America - The Ongoing Search for Answers — A 'Missing in America' Panel

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

For years, Dateline’s 'Missing in America' series has highlighted the stories of the missing and the families who won’t stop searching for their loved ones. Now, four seasons into the podcast — and for the 12th anniversary of the digital series — we’ve brought together some of the people we’ve met along the way for a candid, emotional conversation. You’ll hear from family members like Travis Ware and Sue Quackenbush, from loved ones-turned-advocates like Rachel Barth and Colleen Nick, from retired detective Nan Trogdon, and from MMIWP advocate Raven Payment. Together, they share what they’ve learned in their ongoing fight for answers and offer guidance for others walking the same difficult path. Learn more about the cases mentioned in this podcast. The Disappearance of Alexis Ware: https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/dateline-missing-america-podcast-covers-january-2022-disappearance-alexis-ware-n1297966The Disappearance of Danielle Lopez: https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/dateline-missing-in-america-podcast/danielle-lopez-disappearance-new-jersey-rcna211887The Morgan Nick Case: https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/cold-case-spotlight/mother-missing-morgan-nick-still-fighting-bring-her-home-fbi-n1283729The Disappearance of Kent Jacobs: https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/dateline-missing-in-america-podcast/dateline-missing-america-podcast-covers-march-2002-disappearance-kent-rcna87155The Tyler Goodrich Case: https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/dateline-missing-in-america-podcast/dateline-missing-america-podcast-covers-november-2023-disappearance-ty-rcna163022 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

12 years ago this week, we at Dateline posed a simple question on social media. Have you ever known someone who has gone missing? We did not expect that the response would be overwhelming. Since then, Dateline has covered hundreds of missing persons cases for our online digital series. And for the podcast, it spawned, both called Missing in America. I need answers. I'm her only voice. Each story is different.

However, when you speak with the people involved, the parents, the siblings, the friends, you will hear some common threads, heartbreak, confusion, and often a determination that does not fade with time. Somebody somewhere knows what happened. Missing in America began as a way to shine a light on the stories of the missing.

Now four seasons in, we gathered some of the people we met along the way to find out what they have learned in an often agonizing search for answers and what advice they have for others walking the same difficult path. I'm Josh Mancoitz and this is After the Verdict, a series for our Dateline Premium subscribers. I want to welcome all of you to this special panel. family members. This is advocates. This is a former detective. So just to get everybody up to speed, Sue Quackenbush is the mother of Danielle Lopez. She disappeared last year in central New Jersey. It was agonizing and overwhelming, tragic, unfair. Dan Trogden is a retired detective in Cumberland County, North Carolina, and she investigated the disappearance of a guy named Kent Jacob. In the perfect world, there would be a detective assigned two missing person cases.

Rachel, Barth, was a close friend of a guy named Tyler Goodrich, and he disappeared from Nebraska and was subsequently found, although not alive, unfortunately, but at least there is a sort of semi-answer to that. He was found about 1,000 yards from his house, and so that was really tough to deal with. Colleen Nick is the mother of Morgan Nick who disappeared from Arkansas. It's not just that we lose someone that we love, but the world loses the potential of who that person is. And also my friend Raven Payment,

who I met just recently at the CrimeCon. And she is an advocate from Colorado's MMIR task force. She's worked on a lot of these issues. Unfortunately, most of our family members are all too familiar with this pain in this circumstance. Travis Ware, you're the brother of Alexis Ware. She disappeared from South Carolina. So everybody, take us back to sort of the first 48 hours, the first moments when somebody disappears. Because Travis, I mean, a lot of people are told what you were told, which is, well, you got to wait two days. And that happened to you, didn't it? It did,

unfortunately. And I just have to say those first two days was awful. My sister is not the one to go missing or disappear or run away from her kids. And those two days was probably the hardest two days of my entire life because we couldn't do anything other than posts on social media says she's missing. We couldn't file a police report. We had to wait. Thank God I have the social media following that I have to really push her story out and bring awareness and really get the ball going.

Colleen, you probably didn't even have social media when this began. No, Morgan was kidnapped in 1995. We were visiting in a neighboring community at a baseball game, and she, at the very end of the game, went to catch fireflies with two other children when she was taken. We were one block away from the police department, and they responded immediately. They had 10 separate agencies on site that night. We had an enormous outpouring of resources and response, but there was no technology back then. You know, at one point, someone got a fax machine hooked up so that it would fax continually so that Morgan's flyer would be faxed out. And the media was there the first night. And they said very compassionately to us, like, we're going to have Morgan's face on TV first thing Saturday morning. But, you know, that was 12 hours, more than 12 hours after she was taken. We just did not have those kind of resources that we have now. I mean, you guys tell me whether you agree with this. Now we do have those resources and yet it sometimes takes like it feels like it takes an act of God to get them

deployed. Man, I don't want to make you the target for everybody who has anything to say about law enforcement because I thought the work that we documented that you did was exceptional and heartfelt and you're retired now. But why do you think it is that in so many jurisdictions when parents, for example, walk in and say, my child is missing or my child is missing or my adult child is missing. What they're told is, why don't we wait and see if they come back because they're an adult and they don't have to get in touch with you right now if they don't want to? I think in a case like that, I agree with this 48 hours thing, that's just not right. If a person is missing and a family member comes in, I think it should be actively investigated

right then. Cases grow cold typically in about 48 hours. Well, by the time you've waited 48 hours, you've lost all kinds of evidence. Another problem could be, especially in the smaller departments, there's not enough manpower or enough hours in the day to investigate the crimes that come through. And I know some of you've probably heard that. That's one of the things that sort of we run into again and again and again, which is like should police departments even be the vehicle

for looking for missing people? Because they're not really that well set up to do that. Right. But in the perfect world, there would be a detective assigned to missing person cases, whether it's children, whether it's adults, and that could be their focus constantly. Yeah. First of all, no police officer comes out of the academy saying, I really want to work in missing persons, right? You know, this is not the most desirable assignment within law enforcement, and that kind of is a problem. because you're going to need somebody on this who's going to work pretty hard.

Yes, yes, you are. I know that my case, I picked it up when I was in homicide. Kent Jacobs vanished from Hope Mills, North Carolina in March of 2022. Nan worked on his case tirelessly. It was assigned to the homicide division probably five months after he was missing. I got down to where I would work on it every Friday. one of the family members came in and said, you're only working on this case on Fridays? And I thought I'd done a great job clearing all my cases so I could work on it on Fridays.

And when I told him that, he just looked so defeated. And then I look defeated because I'm thinking, I've cleared my calendar for every Friday to work on this case. Which is a huge thing when you have other cases. Yes, but to a family who's in anguish, who's angry, who's upset, who's frustrated, it wasn't okay. So I agree there needs to be a better system somehow set up. Rachel, you did something that I always advise families to do, which is you didn't wait for the police. No, I did not. Tell me what you did and sort of how people maybe could learn from that.

Sure. So Tyler went missing on a Friday night, and it was kind of that next day when most of us had found out, hey, like, he didn't come home. He's not answering his phone. we weren't exactly sure where he had went and he left on foot. And so that was hard because we weren't tracking a vehicle. We were tracking him. And so really that weekend right away, one of the first things we did was started creating missing persons posters. I pulled a picture off of his Facebook page. I grabbed details of what I knew, how tall he was, roughly his, you know, weights and some of his tattoo photos that I had or friends I'd had of him and just put details on there

where he was last seen, what we think he was doing. And we started fliring neighborhoods and knocking on doors and asking random people if we could see their ring doorbells. We created a Facebook page. And I would say within days, I mean, we were up to 10, 15, 20,000 people. And that caught the attention of the news media pretty quickly. And so then we were able to mobilize and start creating search parties for him. And he wasn't some well-known guy.

This was all stuff that you guys generated. Yeah. I mean, Tyler was known as far as like, you know, people knew him in the community. community. But Lincoln's about 350,000 people. But we all grew up in a small town just outside of Lincoln and Bennett, Nebraska, which is where most of Tyler's family lives. Tyler lived on kind of the outskirts. And so it was interesting when you talk about law enforcement. We weren't exactly sure who was going to be covering his case because he was just kind of right on that county line between it being the county sheriff's department and the Lincoln Police Department.

I will say, I think our experience probably was a little bit different. The sheriff's office did meet with the family weekly. They actually had pulled some of us friends in to review a really grainy video of Tyler running, just to even identify that was him. And they even have their own podcast. So kudos to our local sheriff's office. And they actually invited myself on and a friend of ours on, another friend of ours on. And we talked about Tyler. I mean, what you're describing is the kind of reaction that almost everybody wants. You're definitely describing a department that was more engaged than we frequently hear about. Can I ask Josh, does Lawrence enforcement respond more to the pressure from the media

when the media picks up stories because my daughter's situation is so similar to a Gabby Petito case and yet it's hard to get coverage and I don't know if that helps the police department respond. The pressure I think comes when the media is involved. Am I wrong with that? I think your local stations, your local paper, I think they have the most influence. We didn't cover Gabby Petito at Dateline. We're probably one of the few outlets, I think, that did not.

But the truth is, the most traction any of you are going to get or anybody listening to this is talking to your local station or your local newspaper or your local radio station or the podcast in town that everybody, listens to because the way people get their news is certainly changing now. I mean, being on the six o'clock news used to be the best way of reaching a lot of people. And in some communities, it might not be anymore. Travis, you clearly tried very hard to engage with law enforcement. Yes. And to be honest, a lot of police departments do not take black women gone missing.

Seriously, we won't get the same treatment as when Gabby went missing or when someone else went missing or when another race went missing. I mean, black women are about six and a half. percent of the country. They're like 19 percent of the missing or higher depending on who you ask, which is astonishing. And it's a number that's not really changing. Even an awareness kind of changes. That's true. And it's unfortunate. Raven, are things changing? I feel like that's a loaded question. It's often we take one step forward and then we're often going two steps back. locally in Colorado, we have established a great relationship with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. They take these cases seriously. They are responsive and they go above and beyond when it comes to, for instance, a law enforcement agency dragging their feet on issuing an alert. They will continuously reach out to remind them that they are the resource to issue this alert and they're ready to go. But that said, we still continue to face centuries of systemic issues.

of bias. Most people assume that native people only live on reservations. However, 80% of us, which in Colorado is roughly 206,000 people, live along the front range. So law enforcement neither thinks that we don't exist. When they do think we exist, we then face a lot of stereotypes that we're just out partying. We still have a lot of work to do despite how far we've come. And if you do live on a reservation, you've got problems about. and beyond what we're even talking about now. Absolutely. Jurisdictional issues get more complex.

So you get all these different law enforcement agency jurisdictions involved. And a lot of times they're pointing fingers at each other like, well, that's not my responsibility. Or conversely, like my hands are tied. And I'm not allowed to share information with another agency. And meanwhile, days are going by and this person is still missing. Absolutely. Let me ask all of you this question, but let me start with you, Rachel.

You know, what do you wish you had looking back? What resources did you want deployed that you now realize would have made a difference? So one of the things we did kind of 20-ish days past was we did hire somebody that had like the tracking dogs and they were trained. And so she was a past, I think, detective. And I had heard about her through the Great Vine and finally got a hold of her. I wish we would have knew about that resource early on to track Tyler since he was on foot and we could have easily gotten, you know, articles of clothing. And in fact, his body was out there and the dogs didn't find him.

Yeah, yeah. He was found about 1,000 yards from his house. That was just a question of the trail going cold before the dogs went out. Yeah, and I wish we would have had, you know, I'm learning more about kind of the digital footprint. And so I know there are nonprofits and organizations. working with law enforcement to learn how to track digital footprints. And a lot of that is, unfortunately, having to work with Google or work with Verizon or work with the cell phone towers to get that. Because a lot of that, you have to have the right people to contact. And then,

of course, you have to have, like, maybe a court order to release that information. And so I feel like that bogged us down because Tyler had a cell phone, an iPhone. He had a smart watch. And like, how are we not tracking his watch? How are we not tracking this stuff? And so that was really frustrating to me. And then I'm finding out afterwards that there is those technologies. So I wish that was something we pushed early on. Sue, Travis, Colleen, same question. What do you wish you'd had? What do you wish you knew now? Colleen, you've got unfortunately 30 years to look back on. Tell me what you learned. I mean, if we could take one thing back to 1995 that we have now would be all the technology and all the resources that we have. The biggest thing for me is I wish we had the support from the

police department. You know, I do think that makes a tremendous difference in cases. Colleen has been searching for her daughter Morgan since Morgan vanished from Alma, Arkansas. That was in June of 1995. And while she's always had the support of her local police department, her organization, the Morgan Nick Foundation, is working to help families that have not received that same treatment. What we have tried to make up in the interim is the advocating for families to stand in the gap to help them be able to build that communication with law enforcement to bridge the lack of communication that happens like between Travis's family and law enforcement to be that voice that is trusted by law enforcement and to help them see what it is the family

needs. One of the things that we do is we invite that family and that law enforcement team to our office and we bring them to the table together and we break bread. We eat a meal together, and it literally breaks the barriers down, and everybody talks. I was just thinking about that. In Travis's case, I was thinking if we could just get his family and law enforcement at a table together and to get them to talk to each other, it would change everything, literally everything. I would love for that to happen. That's a great idea.

I think that's a great idea. Since we're talking about this, tell me about the Alexis Ware Act. Yeah, so the Alexis Ware Act, that's something that our family has really been working and very, very hard to get passed. The Lexus were at, after 12 months a year that an individual's family member has been missing, we wanted to be turned over to the FBI, have the police department release that case over to the FBI to have an extra resource that can really help with the family find their loved ones.

And that engagement, that time you spend talking to law enforcement, that's like a second job or a first job. sometimes. Sue, I'm guessing you saw that firsthand. I mean, the amount of time you spent with them with law enforcement advocating, like it takes over your life, doesn't it? Law enforcement has been great now or staying in touch with me. I think that would be really hard for me right now if they didn't answer me, they do respond pretty directly. And Colleen, my heart just breaks for you, a six-year-old child. My pain is so intense. And yet I had 37 years with my daughter. So my heart goes out to you. You're very brave to be on here and speak with us. Thank you, Sue. I appreciate that. But the

heart of it is, is that when you lose someone, you lose someone. It doesn't matter how old they are, or if you're their friend or you're their family, that hurts. It rips your heart. It's one of the, I mean, it's the most terrifying thing I've ever walked through in my life, but my fight has always been for Morgan. She's not a newspaper story. She is a sister. She's a daughter. She's a granddaughter. her. She's a friend. And she deserves the respect to be able to come home. I think one of the like kind of sickening things about all of this is when somebody told me you have to market the missing. And, you know, that hit home because that's my major. I mean, I'm my master's in marketing. I'm a PR person. That's what I've done my whole life. And so, you know, maybe I was the

perfect person to help, you know, spearhead finding Tyler. But it's really true. You do have to market the missing because you are taking on responsibility to keep them front and center. And it's crazy, but like those little stories about them, I think some of the most impactful things that we did was having like Tyler's dad talk to media because every parent can, just like you guys, can, you know, the hurt breaks for them because they saw Tyler's dad super sad. They saw us out there. You know, we videoed, they had people videoing us walking and like crawling through muck and crawling through trees and doing these things and talking about how we were friends with him since kindergarten and telling those stories about him. Tyler was just incredibly unique as well. He was this,

you know, tall, athletic white male from Lincoln, Nebraska, and he was gay and he adopted two boys and he was a veteran. And like he just had this really just distinct look to him. And so, and we kind of took advantage of that in a positive way because we had to market Tyler to keep his story relevant because unfortunately those stories do go to the wayside because the next missing person comes up or the next you know whatever happens and you're no longer in the new story anymore I just offered of my own money a $25,000 reward because there was no more ways to market I mean, that brings up another topic, which is when families of the missing end up getting scammed by people who realize that there is money to be made out here. I don't think this is a, I don't think this is an unknown topic to any of you.

They're scammed terribly with gruesome details and knowledge and pictures and, you know, I bought into it for a few days clinging to hope until, you know, it proved itself to what it was. And then I contacted law enforcement and there's nothing they can do as far as these burner phones and things that are communicating with me. I didn't pay any money for the scam and in offering the reward, I haven't volunteered any of my personal information. The specifics of this scam were known to law enforcement, but I was never made aware. And I wish to make that aware for everybody. So no one ever suffers what I suffered those couple of days. Colleen, you must have seen this over the years.

I mean, have people offered to tell you, you know, either information about the case or where they thought Morgan was in exchange for a couple of dollars? No, we've never had anybody try to charge us for information. I think maybe because Morgan's case is very high profile and there's just so much law enforcement involved in her case. We did have someone who tried to steal her identity once. It immediately was flagged in our state. But it took police three days to find this person

who had decided they would find a missing child and steal their identity. It was crazy to us that that could even happen. Sue, you hired a private investigator. One of the things, you know, I always tell people like there's a lot of things that are portrayed on TV, particularly in TV dramas, not on programs like Dateline, but in TV dramas that are not actually true. But one of the things that I've always thought is kind of accurate is the way that the relationship between private investigators and police is portrayed, which is frequently law enforcement is not interested in hearing from. PIs from people who came up with information that they personally did not come up with. Man, you're nodding.

You're accurate in that statement. They just don't want to hear it. Law enforcement feels like they're trained better, even if this person is a retired officer. Yeah. Raven, what do you tell families? I mean, is there a playbook for this? So there are two indigenous communities specific. playbooks that have been developed by other organizations that we do refer families to.

We've also developed, essentially, we call it a script for families when they need to call law enforcement to report their loved one or their friend missing to try to generate the urgency of that missing indigenous person alert. But oftentimes then we're helping them generate those flyers. We're helping organize searches. We're helping mobilize media contacts. And then also letting law enforcement know that we're watching them and we expect them to do a good job and give them the attention they deserve. Families being seen makes a big difference, doesn't it? Absolutely. I would say in the response to like this overwhelming stress, one of the most comforting things that you can do for people in these situations is let them know that they're

heard and they're seen and they're validated and that we believe them and that they know their loved one best and that something is wrong. And we're here to help them fix that. And you want them in front of the camera in a lot of times, not necessarily the police department. Absolutely. We also help coach families and like how to speak to the media, sit with them to make sure, you know, they can work through the stress levels, the grief. But honestly, the most impactful words typically come from the families. And then if they need a spokesperson or they feel that they want that, you know, we can help with that too. Yeah. Let me ask all of you. What is it you need a detective or an advocate? or anybody who's dealing with this to sort of understand about your experience. From like our community, it's humanizing people.

This is a daughter. This is a son. This is a friend. This is a person who had hopes and dreams. Yeah. There's kind of a belief on the part of the public, which I've found is hard to change, which is that if that person did anything that they view as having put themselves in harm's way, it's a way to kind of write it off, right?

She went out at night alone in her car. She didn't have enough gas. Like, what you think was going to happen? Josh, here's what that is really all about. And you guys tell me if you think I'm wrong. But it makes everybody else feel safe because they can say this person did these behaviors and that's why they're missing.

That's why something terrible has happened to them. But I wouldn't do that. And my kids wouldn't do that. My family wouldn't do that. I wouldn't make those kind of choices, so that won't happen to me. And if I'm careful, my family and I don't really have anything to worry about. Right. So you blame that person who's missing because it makes you feel safe.

Yeah. Victim blaming is so big. And I think, you know, like in Tyler's case, we wanted, everybody wanted somebody to blame, right? Tyler wasn't here to blame. So you wanted to blame somebody. And I think that's what's really hard is because our brains want to, rationalize what happened, right? But I think that's hard as we all rationalize things and then rumors start. And then that's when like things spiral out of control. And especially now with social

media, all the TikTokers and the conspiracy theorists get out there. And that definitely happened in Tyler's case. And it's really hard to stay ahead of that. Yeah, I mean, his husband got kind of eaten alive on social media. Oh, absolutely. Yep. Absolutely. And they have kids that are in high school. And I mean, those kids have phones and they're hearing it and they're seeing it and people are talking about. I mean, it's... Social media can be a double-edged sword. I mean, it's a way of getting the story out there. It's also a way of

having crazy people weigh in on your case or people who have a completely different agenda. Travis, you experienced some of that, didn't you? I did a lot. My entire family did. It got so bad we had to send a cease and desist out on a YouTuber.

He made this recent founder, he made a little over $10,000 on videos just on my sister's case along. He was putting out false narratives. He was lying on our family telling Phillips about her children, about her mom, about our dad. It got so bad that we had to get to the police department where he lives all the way in Texas to get him to stop. And they're just trying to get famous or trying to get notoriety off a case, which is sad that people to this day

is playing with her case and make it into a circus. And honestly, social media has been great because I've been able to push a story, but it's also been bad because we have individuals there are just trying to become famous our friend. A. Some of those people are truly genuinely evil. And others are like absolutely trying to help you get to the end of this. And it's hard to tell who's which. It is. Very hard. It helps, doesn't it, to have one person be the person that communicates with either the police or with the public? I mean, Colleen, that's definitely been you. Absolutely. And I think it reduces the confusion and the chaos if you have one person from a family who's communicating with law enforcement or one person who's communicating

with the media. It just reduces the chaos. Yeah. And it might, in some case, maybe makes it easier on the other family members. So in our family, when Morgan was first missing, her dad was right there doing all the media stuff too. He's a very quiet man, and a reporter actually said to him, pushed past him one day at a press conference and said, we don't want to talk to you. Everybody wants to talk to the mother. And it was really a defining moment for him, and he stepped back from talking to the press. And in fact, did not do another interview until about five years ago.

Hulu has a documentary on Morgan's case called Still Missing Morgan. and that was the first time he came back out and talked because that reporter pushed him aside in that way. In my case, I am the only one left. There isn't anyone left to do this. It takes a toll, doesn't it? I know we're all talking about just this weight on our families and how if we don't keep pushing,

law enforcement doesn't do their job. But that is our responsibility. It really does fall to us not to quit. because if we quit, everybody quits. Everybody gives up. And so families and friends who stay out there and keep the case in the media and keep talking and keep highlighting, that's what makes the difference. The faces of law enforcement change, but you guys are still there. And I always think, you know, if the rules were reversed, would that missing person be doing this for me?

And the answer is always yes. And so, you know, it's hard. I'm sure most of us have full-time jobs and I have a family and little kids and this did consume 16 months of not just my life, but Tyler's entire family and, you know, his husband and his kids and really everybody was on alert and you couldn't go anywhere in the community without people recognizing you and stopping you and asking questions. And then when we did find him, it was absolutely devastating. But also there was that sense of relief. And so I'm sorry for you that have not found your loved one because I was there and now that we have him,

I don't want to say it gets better, but at least you have answers. And so I am really sorry that you guys are still having to go through that. Raven, do you tell families to be ready for the long haul? I mean, how do you couch it? I think kind of the uncomfortable truth here when it comes to my community and families that we work with is that this usually isn't their first rodeo. Oftentimes, families that we've worked with have had multiple people and their families either be victims of homicide or they've had other family members go missing

that have never been recovered. So unfortunately, most of our family members are all too familiar with this pain and this circumstance, which is kind of where our task force was founded in the first place. Arriven, that is heartbreaking to hear you say that in your community, this is a familiar, that having someone go missing is a familiar. your thing that happens because most of the time when your child is missing you don't know who to talk to in your community there you can't go to your neighbor and say what did you do when your child was missing or when your loved one was missing and that it's heartbreaking to me that

the families you work with that this is familiar to them yeah um even we we call it a list but it is it list kind of i feel like sterilizes it and that's not how we've used it, but the compilation of relatives in Colorado who have been missing and murdered, I mean, we oftentimes have, we have two mother daughters on the list. Yeah, I mean, I said this to Raven when we first met, which was, we're doing six missing in America cases every year on the Dateline podcast. I think we're going to be doing six in the season ahead, too. And we could do every single one of those if we wanted to about indigenous victims. And we wouldn't even be scratching the surface.

I mean, to say that that's an epidemic is to kind of understate it. I thank you guys for sharing and helping me. This is helpful to hear and know a not totally boxer in the ring that you guys are out there plugging away at this impossible journey.

And there's been some help that you share. I mean, this takes a giant junk out of you. I know it does. Well, and, you know, Josh, it's not just that we lose someone that we love, but the world loses the potential of who that person is and what they bring and what they offer. You know, Morgan's dream at six years old was to grow up to be a doctor and a circus performer. And the world got cheated of what she had to offer. And I think that, you know, as we stand here, families and advocates, we're saying to the world that we can't afford to lose our future.

We can't afford to lose what our children have to offer. I think that's right. Travis, were you about to say something? No, I agree. Oftentimes, we don't have anyone we can talk to because they can't relate to what we are going through. So this panel, I feel so much calmer because I have individuals that, yes, we're going through hardships, but we all have something that we can relate to. Good.

I'm glad that this may be did you a little good here. I hope you guys are all going to stay in touch because I think that's probably pretty valuable. Thank you all for doing this. I really appreciate it. You can learn more about the cases of, Alexis Ware, Danielle Lopez, Morgan Nick, Kent Jacobs, and Tyler Goodrich at the links in our description. Thanks for listening and for subscribing. See you Fridays on Dateline on NBC. After The Verdict is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Keani Reed and Veronica Maseka are the producers.

Liz Brown Curloff is Senior Producer. Thank you.