April 25, 2012|By Peter Hermann
If the allegations prove true, Det. Daniel T. Nicholson IV's alleged rogue search for his own missing daughter is troublesome. Baltimore police are investigating whether he used his badge to enter homes as part of an unauthorized investigation.
You could also say that he did what any father would do to find his daughter.
Nicholson led the high-profile search for Phylicia Barnes, the North Carolina teenager who disappeared from the city, and whose body was found last year in the Susquehanna River. Police were all over national television, but Nicholson spoke out just once.
But his passion for the case came through. He noted his own daughters, and how he sympathized with Phylicia's father, to whom he spoke regularly. Here's part of that story from February 2011, a month after Phylicia had gone missing:
As promising leads fizzle and searches turn up nothing, the baffling case takes a toll not only on Phylicia's family but on police as well.
"This is a young girl who was well-liked in high school," said Detective Daniel T. Nicholson IV of the homicide unit, the lead investigator. "She was doing what any young person would do, visiting her family ... and she vanished from the face of the earth. That's hard to believe."
Nicholson, a 17-year police veteran with two daughters of his own, said the case is "frustrating in that we've run out every lead, no matter how ridiculous or impossible it might seem."
The detective said he's in daily contact with Phylicia's father, who travels between Baltimore and his home in Atlanta, and with her mother in Monroe, N.C. His biggest fear, he says, is that "it's not going to be a happy ending."
Police pulled together a squad of six detectives - ones with the highest arrest and conviction rates - taking them off other cases to devote their time to finding Phylicia, turning this into one of the department's most exhaustive missing-person investigations in years.
"We're not scaling back," said Maj. Terrence McLarney, head of the homicide unit. Added the squad's leader, Sgt. William P. Simmons: "This is all we are about - Phylicia Barnes."
Now, Nicholson is subject of an internal and criminal investigation. His daughter has been found safe, but the father is suspended. Read more details about the case and Nicholson's troubling history with his daughter.
