ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller: Parents kept an excruciating secret

PRESCOTT, Ariz. – Little by little, family by family, word began filtering out in this small town nestled against the craggy foothills north of Phoenix.

It began in 2013 as an iron-clad secret tightly held by the parents of an American aid volunteer in Syria: Their daughter was missing. For months, they said nothing.

But in August, Islamic State militants posted a video online of their beheading of American journalist James Foley. Other gruesome slayings followed. The worried family began revealing the basics to a small coterie of friends who have also lived in Prescott for generations.

The efforts to contain that secret from outsiders were extraordinary, the family said in a statement Friday, including begging journalists from around the world to keep her name out of reports and refrain from even mentioning that an American woman was being held hostage by Islamic State.

On Friday, however, the name Kayla Mueller reverberated across the airwaves and Internet, disclosed by the group holding her captive. Mueller, they said, was dead, killed in an air attack against them in Syria by coalition forces.

“Almost another kind of violence, to release the name they said they wanted kept out of the media,” said optometrist Thomas Geiler, a friend of the family.

Mueller, 26, whose parents still hold out hope that she’s alive, has a lengthy history of volunteering to help women and children, having worked for aid groups in Arizona before setting out for countries including India and Turkey.

In August 2013, she was abducted in the Syrian city of Aleppo as she left a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders. A purported statement from Islamic State militants said Friday that a Jordanian airstrike had killed Mueller, who was being held in Raqqah, a militant stronghold in northern Syria.

“She would tell us where she was going, and we’d say, ‘What?’ ” Geiler recalled. “I asked her, couldn’t you go look at (endangered) butterflies in Colorado? But that’s not who she is.”

Mueller’s abduction had consequences at home. It was one of the main reasons her father sold his auto parts business, Geiler said, so he could concentrate on his missing daughter. In the meantime, her parents have relied on their Christian faith, Geiler said.

The Turkish aid group with whom she once worked, Support to Life, declined to provide details about Mueller in a statement issued Friday other than to convey their condolences and hope the reports of her death were untrue.

Kayla Mueller’s parents, Carl and Marsha, said they remained hopeful she was still alive and appealed to her captors to contact them privately. As they waited, they reflected on their daughter’s dreams.

“The common thread of Kayla’s life has been her quiet leadership and strong desire to serve others,” a family statement said.

The Muellers live in a home accessible by only one road in an area north of Prescott called Williamson Valley.

The region is verdant and pastoral, with large lots where cattle graze on tall grass. It is also no stranger to tragedy – two years ago, 19 men from an elite firefighting crew were killed in a massive wildfire in nearby Yarnell. Their names and faces are on posters still visible in Prescott’s downtown.

Many in town were still learning of the unconfirmed reports of Kayla Mueller’s death Saturday, including Richard Eason, one of the so-called ambassadors of the city’s Old West-style downtown.

“Sad deal,” he said, eyeing the news trucks parked near the county courthouse. “Hopefully you all come back sometime when the news isn’t so bad.”

After attending Northern Arizona University, Mueller lived and worked with aid groups in northern India, Israel and the Palestinian territories. She returned to Arizona in 2011, where she worked at an HIV/AIDS clinic and volunteered at a women’s shelter. Late that year, she moved to southeastern France and worked as an au pair while learning French in preparation for a planned move to Africa.

But the plight of families fleeing the violence in war-torn Syria drew her to Turkey in December 2012.