CNN
 — 

Connie Long kept her eyes glued to the door at the high school auditorium. She expected her younger sister to burst in at any moment, frazzled and excited.

As a senior at Platte Canyon High School, Maggie Long was involved in staging the event –- a concert by a local Denver rock band –- and her family knew she’d never miss it.

But as the opening band played and the minutes dragged on, the 17-year-old was nowhere to be found.

“I had a weird feeling. I knew something was very wrong,” Connie said. “Maggie was responsible, dependable. She had helped organize this concert. There was no reason for her to be late or not show up.”

Her intuition was right. Connie didn’t realize it at the time, but her sister had rushed home after classes that afternoon to collect home-baked cookies for the school event in Bailey, Colorado.

Soon after, a mysterious fire broke out at the Long family’s sprawling, ranch-style house. Firefighters discovered Maggie’s remains that night in the charred ruins.

As investigators dug deeper, they uncovered harrowing details about how a simple cookie errand turned into a fatal encounter.

Authorities later determined that Maggie had walked in on intruders who were robbing her parents’ home. After a physical altercation, the men set the home ablaze — with her inside — and escaped with a green safe, a Beretta handgun, an AK-47-style rifle, jade figurines and 2,000 rounds of ammunition, the FBI said.

Shortly before the fire, a tenant renting a guest suite in the house had called 911 and reported hearing loud banging noises. The tenant escaped the blaze unharmed and was cleared by police of any involvement in the crime, authorities said.

A coroner later ruled Maggie Long’s death a homicide. The Park County sheriff told reporters that Maggie likely burned to death when the robbers started the fire to destroy evidence.

Her killers haven’t been identified, and the motive behind the horrific attack on December 1, 2017, remains a mystery. On last month’s seventh anniversary of the deadly fire, police implored anyone with information about Maggie’s killers to come forward.

“She told her friends she’ll be right back, and she was never seen again,” Park County Sheriff Tom McGraw said at a news conference. “We believe someone knows something that could help solve this case and bring a measure of justice to Maggie’s family and the Bailey community.”

Investigators have received about 415 tips related to the case so far, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation told CNN this month. The FBI released a sketch of three suspects and implored anyone with information to come forward.

But as authorities try to unravel what happened that night in the mountain community of 9,000 people, questions and speculation still linger. Was Maggie killed because she saw the robbers? Was it a hate crime against her Chinese family? Or was the home targeted because her parents owned several successful restaurants, and the robbers thought they stored cash in the house?

Connie Long was living on her own in Denver at the time. She’d driven to Bailey to see her sister and support her at the event.

“Maggie was going to set up the VIP room for the concert, and had stayed up all night baking cookies,” she said. “So I went to the high school to meet her. And then I waited and waited.”

Connie tried calling, but the call went straight to voicemail, which she said was not unusual given the spotty cell service in the mountains. She then drove the 30 minutes to their parents’ home, where she encountered a fleet of police cars and firetrucks. Maggie’s silver Cadillac was parked outside.

“I could still smell the smoke – they had just extinguished the fire,” she said. “And I was asking, where’s my sister? What happened?”

The sisters’ parents, San and Hy Long, had lived in the 6,000-square-foot house for nearly two decades. The property sat on 11 acres of remote forest in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, about an hour southwest of Denver.

The Longs are Chinese immigrants who were forced out of northern Vietnam by war. They moved to Macau and eventually Hong Kong, where they lived as refugees for years before immigrating to Colorado in the late 1980s, Connie said.

“They were in the United States with the hope of building a safe and secure life for their family,” Connie Long said. “They were so resilient and went through all of that to come to America — just to face even more trauma.”

The Longs settled in Colorado after they learned about job opportunities for service workers there, said Lynna Long, their oldest daughter, who lives in Westminster, Colorado, a Denver suburb.

San Long worked as a chef in a Chinese restaurant in the early 1990s, and the owner sold him the business after he retired, Lynna said. It marked the beginning of her parents owning four restaurants in the Denver area, she said.

In Bailey they raised a boy and three girls, including Maggie, their third and youngest daughter. Growing up in the mountains, the sisters said, they felt so safe at home that they had no security cameras.

“Not only was it a small community, our house was behind trees and our driveway was like a mile long,” Connie said. “We were nowhere near the main county road. So there wasn’t a lot of concern about anything sketchy happening.”

But that horrific Friday night shattered their lives and sense of security, the sisters said. As the family grieved, they spent several chaotic weeks working with various law enforcement agencies.

To protect the integrity of the investigation, a judge issued a gag order prohibiting anyone involved with the case from releasing information publicly.

By then, the family knew that Maggie’s body had been found in the house, even though that information had not been publicly released. But because of the gag order, they couldn’t share the news or grieve her openly.

“Police wanted to keep details of the investigation from getting out into the greater community,” Lynna Long said. “And the hope was that in the initial days, if they got information from outside sources, they would be able to validate it more easily if not much was known.”

But it only added to the confusion, she said, as many local residents questioned the lack of search efforts for Maggie at the time.

“The community was very upset when they learned later that she had died earlier,” Lynna said.

The remains of the house were marked a crime scene, and the Longs never lived in it again.

Years later, investigators are still searching for suspects — and a motive

It’s now been more than seven years since Maggie Long’s killing, and there have been no arrests.

It’s now considered a cold case, the FBI said. A taskforce that comprises the Park County Sheriff’s Office, Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) still meets regularly about the case. The ATF is part of the investigation because of the missing firearms.

Authorities built sketches of three suspects based on witness accounts from the tenant who called 911 and others who saw two light-colored vans and an old pickup truck leaving the property, police said.

Authorities have offered a reward of up to $75,000 for information leading to arrests. Investigators also have suggested there may have been a fourth suspect.

Four years after the deadly fire, the FBI classified Maggie’s homicide as a hate crime in 2021. The FBI declined to comment to CNN on why it believes her killing could have been racially motivated. The Park County Sheriff’s Office referred all questions to the CBI. A spokesperson for the CBI referred questions on the hate crime aspect to the FBI.

Growing up in Bailey, the sisters said, they felt unwelcome in some areas. But they don’t remember any instances of overt racism.

The Longs had owned restaurants in the area for almost 20 years and had numerous employees and neighbors who knew their daily routines and when they’d be home, the sisters said.

“So if our home was targeted for any reason, they would know that no one was home,” Lynna said.

She said she believes the case was classified as a hate crime because of a belief that Chinese immigrants rarely use banks and keep their money at home.

“That is the perspective that investigators were approaching our case (with)” she said. “It’s technically targeting a minority under the assumption that their banking practices are different.”

Not long after their daughter’s killing, the Longs sold one of their restaurants and retired. They moved to the Denver suburb of Broomfield, where they live now with their son.

“My parents were already in the process of retiring from the restaurant business,” Lynna said. “This just expedited their plans to leave the area. It was difficult for them to be there.”

Years later, the Longs are still struggling with the loss of their youngest daughter. They’ve set up a room in her honor in their home. It contains her personal belongings that weren’t lost in the fire, including a red Jansport backpack, a water bottle with her last drink still in it, a clarinet and a navy blue softball jersey. Several awards, including from speech and debate club, are displayed on a table. Portraits of a beaming Maggie adorn the walls.

Maggie died about two weeks before she turned 18. She was excited about attending college but had not picked a major or decided where to go, her sisters said. She was trying to decide whether to follow her passion — performing arts — or go into health care.

“She was stressed. She was trying to figure it out,” Connie Long said.

Sometimes, when Connie misses her sister, she goes through her laptop, journal and other personal items.

The details give her glimpses into Maggie’s final years. “I read in her journal that she borrowed my stuff, like my makeup or clothes,” she said. “I had no idea.”

A year before Maggie was killed, she wrote a tribute in her journal about a close friend and classmate who had died. In a sad irony, her grieving family strives to live by Maggie’s words and channel her spirit.

“I think the only real cure to cope with loss is to continue to be good people. Be kind. Be caring. Be passionate. Be thoughtful,” Maggie wrote in the message, which she also shared on Facebook.

“Share love and consider everyone around you, from strangers to acquaintances to peers to friends,” she added. “Enough people have experienced pain to understand that life is far more measurable in joy and good memories than to be scorched with cruelty and loss.”