For hostage’s family, Christmas brings another milestone to their wait
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Like a lot of parents, Marc and Debra Tice hope their son will be with them on Christmas.
Chances are slim that he will.
Austin Tice, a freelance foreign correspondent and former Marine, has been held captive in Syria since May 2012.
“Whenever we hear, ‘I’ll be Home for Christmas,’ it’s tough around here,” his mother, Debra Tice, said in a phone interview from the family’s Houston home.
The Tices, however, got news recently giving them hope their son may come home – if not this Christmas then someday.
On Friday, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said on the Senate floor that he’d confirmed “positive yet cautious news” from James O’Brien, President Barack Obama’s special envoy for hostage affairs.
“They have high confidence that Austin is alive in Syria, along with other Americans who are being held captive,” said Cornyn, a Texas Republican.
No one has claimed responsibility for taking Tice, who was reporting on the Syrian War for McClatchy newspapers.
The last his parents have seen of their son was a video released five weeks after he disappeared. It shows a group of men pushing their blindfolded son, then 31, in a mountainous rocky area.
“Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus,” he says, as the video ends.
In the years since, Debra and Marc Tice have gotten up before dawn every day to scour the Internet for any new hint of their son. When the call came from O’Brien, she said, “We had to put the phone down and take a breath.”
In the family’s home, Austin Tice grew up with a window on the world outside Houston. The radio was often turned to NPR. What they heard from its correspondents dictated each day’s home-schooled lessons.
Where was this country they heard about? What was going on there? How were newspapers there reporting on the same events?
Discussions continued at the dinner table, where the family’s seven children would all talk at once.
After entering the University of Houston at 16, and transferring to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Austin Tice was in Washington when the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11.
He attended Georgetown Law School for a year before, like many of those directly affected by the attacks, he joined the Marines. After his third deployment in Afghanistan, Tice took a leave and went to Syria in 2012 to pursue his dream of reporting abroad.
“When you teach your child to live your life with passion, you can’t say, ‘We were just kidding. Do something that makes it easy for your parents to sleep at night,’” Marc Tice said.
On their website, www.austinticefamily.com, Austin Tice’s family writes that he went to Syria to “tell the story of the ongoing conflict there, and its impact on the ordinary people of Syria.” On Tuesday the website counted the days of his captivity at “01584,” the “0” acknowledging the uncertainty of his release.
Tice’s family said he was moved while reporting on the suffering of Syrian civilians. His articles and photos put a human face on what was happening.
According to a Texas Monthly article in 2015, Tice wrote on Twitter, “Saw a girl who’d been hit in the head by a tank round. 3 other kids died in the attack. She has brain damage and can’t walk. I broke down.”
He was last known to be just south of Damascus, planning to leave for Lebanon.
“We believe he got into a car but never made it to the border,” the Tices wrote.
The Tices are consumed with making sure people do not forget their son is out there, somewhere, and needs help.
Their cause has been taken up by Reporters Without Borders, a nonprofit devoted to the freedom of the press worldwide. Since November, the group has hung a large banner with Tice’s picture outside the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
It also has an online petition to keep his name alive, and Debra Tice is asking people to write Congress to make sure the government keeps pressing for his release.
The Tices hope that President-elect Donald Trump will notice the banner as he passes it during his inaugural parade, on his way to the White House after being sworn in at the Capitol on Jan. 20.
They want him to continue the Obama administration’s efforts, including by preserving O’Brien’s position dedicated to making diplomatic efforts to get American hostages released.
Cornyn spoke of the family’s uncertainty last week when he observed, “They’re counting those milestones that we typically observe in our families – birthdays and holidays that they will never recover.”
On another milestone next week, a line of stockings will hang from mantle for Tice’s siblings, nieces and nephews. There will be one for Austin Tice, as well.
“It will be a joyous time,” Marc Tice said of the holidays, “but there will be a hole.”
For more information about Austin Tice and the Reporters Without Borders petition see rsf.org/en/freeaustintice
Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C. reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Contact him at kmurakami@cnhi.com.