Slaying victim Amber Creek’s family speaks out

April 16--Robert Creek slept through the night for the first time in years after police recently told him they had made an arrest in the killing of his 14-year-old daughter.

Since 1997, the year she went missing, the Palatine father has lived with grief, anger and guilt about the disturbing chain of events that led to Amber Creek's death.

He knows it is difficult for people to understand why he asked the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to take temporary custody of his daughter, a chronic runaway, just weeks before she died. The system failed them both, authorities agree.

"Life began for me" on April 5, said Creek, 53, who knew when he received a call from police that day that this was the news he had waited for. "That's when they told me, 'He's sitting behind bars.'"

James Eaton, 36, of Palatine, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse in Racine County, Wis. He is expected in court Wednesday for a preliminary hearing.

The arrest does not erase Robert Creek's pain, but it gives him hope that justice might be served in his lifetime.

"I loved her with all of my heart," said Creek, who agreed to sit down with the Tribune because he wanted to explain how hard it was to get help for his daughter and to make people aware that he did his best.

Creek said his faith in God and the kindness of Wisconsin authorities carried him through the years.

Amber was a typical child in so many ways.

She climbed trees, whirled around in circles until she was dizzy and pretended her hairbrush was a microphone when she sang.

But by age 14, she was deeply emotionally disturbed and mimicked bad behaviors she had experienced early in life, family members said. She carried around a vial of powdered sugar, pretending it was cocaine. She whispered details about having been sexually abused as a young child. She ran away repeatedly, telling her cousins she was hanging out with older boys in the woods.

But Amber, even after being made a ward of the state and placed in a shelter for her own safety, had always returned to her family's home in Palatine -- until one day in January 1997.

"I knew when she was gone," Creek said. "She would have called home. She was never gone more than three days."

Amber was killed about two weeks after she disappeared for the last time from a state-operated residential shelter for teens in Chicago, authorities believe. Some hunters found her nearly frozen, partially clothed body near a marsh in Racine County in February 1997 -- though more than 16 months would pass before authorities identified the body as Amber.

Fingerprint samples collected from a black plastic bag around her head led police to Eaton earlier this year. His DNA matched samples taken from Amber's body at the time of the slaying, prosecutors say. She had been beaten and sexually assaulted, with a $5 price tag from Woodfield Mall stuck to her arm.

The arrest "is a relief," said Desiree Reeves, 30, one of Amber's cousins. "It was very emotional."

Family members said they do not know the suspect or how he and Amber might have met, and authorities so far have not revealed those details.

"You don't know how to deal with it," said Ronda Reynolds, of Carpentersville, one of Robert Creek's three siblings. The arrest "brings back all those feelings and emotions and memories."

Robert Creek said he and Amber's mother had lived together only two years and never married.

Her mother, who could not be reached for comment, had custody of the girl until she was 6, when Amber revealed that she had been sexually abused by a man, according to a DCFS report.

After moving in with her father, Amber would often cry herself to sleep and had little contact with her biological mother, her father said. Amber began sneaking out of the house and acting out in increasingly self-destructive ways.

During family campouts, she would tell her cousins about her former abuse and her escapades.

"She told me she was in the woods with a few boys," Reeves said. "I remember asking her, 'Why? Why do you sneak out?' I was scared for her. I was."

A psychiatrist recommended intensive residential therapy, which Creek said he could not afford.

He was able to secure Amber some outpatient therapy through a local hospital, but when the insurance coverage ran out, he said, "she'd come back home and the problems started again."

"Our psychiatrist ... wanted her in a locked-in facility," Creek said. "He said -- and these are his exact words -- 'Someone's going to kill her if we don't do something.' She was putting herself into more dangerous situations."

Amber was experimenting with drugs and alcohol, he said, but he denied she had any addictions. She rebelled because she did not want to go to counseling and "she didn't want to deal with it," he said.

The summer before her freshman year at Palatine High School, Amber "spiraled down," he said. "She didn't have the ability to keep relationships."

By the time school started, she had become a chronic runaway, he said. At that point, Creek had investigated private residential treatment centers and found they cost $40,000 to $50,000.

He begged DCFS to take Amber in, but the agency fought his efforts, he said. As a last resort, he took his daughter into the Palatine police station and signed the paperwork that forced the state agency to take temporary custody. He would later come to regret that he hadn't kept Amber at home.

"He was a good father," said Denise Kane, now inspector general for DCFS, who was involved in Amber's case at the time. "He did his best in trying to get her help and searched so hard for her when she went missing."

After DCFS placed Amber at the Columbus-Maryville shelter on Chicago'sNorth Side in late 1996, she ran away nine times, spending 29 of the 44 days she was in state custody on "runaway status," according to the agency's report.

Because of miscommunication between DCFS and law enforcement, Chicago police did not receive a formal report about Amber's disappearance until after she had been gone for more than four weeks, the DCFS report confirms.

Creek said he called the agency repeatedly to complain that when DCFS did post information about his missing daughter, workers provided inaccurate information and another girl's photo.

"If it wasn't for my faith, I don't know how I would have survived this," said Creek, adding that the ordeal destroyed his marriage to Amber's stepmother. "There's nothing harder."

Karen Hawkins, spokeswoman for DCFS, said the agency "changed (its) policies in response to the handling of this case.

"The current policy requires immediate notification of law enforcement and sets out a protocol for what folks are supposed to do," she said.

Amber was last seen at a motel party in Rolling Meadows a few weeks before her body was discovered.

As it turns out, the suspect, Eaton, lived less than 3 miles from Creek's home.

"She will never be forgotten. Ever," said Sherice Reynolds, 30, a cousin who lives in Lake in the Hills.

She plans to attend Eaton's court hearings.

"I want to be there to stand tall and stand proud for my cousin."

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