DELPHI, Ind. – When Rob Cochran swung by the corner of the Hoosier Heartland Highway and Indiana 218 on Thursday, the 20 muddy acres laid out for the Abby and Libby Memorial Park wasn’t nearly as far along as he hoped it would be when Milestone Contractors dropped off equipment early the week before.

Rain did give way enough during about five of those days that volunteers from Milestone and the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 103 out of Kokomo could put a bulldozer, a grader and two scrapers out into the thick dirt.

“For a lot of it, we were spinning our wheels,” Cochran, general superintendent with Milestone, said. “I was just up there, and there’s so much more work to be done. The conditions haven’t been the best.”

Milestone has done enough road construction in Delphi, including around the Carroll County Courthouse, that Cochran said the company, with offices about 17 miles away in Lafayette, considers Delphi “a Milestone town.” And like anyone who considers Delphi home, everyone at Milestone was well invested in what happened to Abby Williams and Libby German in February 2017.

“It was so terrible,” Cochran said. The double murders on Delphi’s Monon High Bridge Trail remain unsolved. “We thought about contributing to the reward money, but everybody can give a dollar. But what can we do that other companies maybe can’t do?”

What Milestone could do turned into one of those big moments for Abby and Libby Memorial Park, since Mike and Becky Patty, Libby German’s grandparents, hatched the idea for a park in the months after the girls were killed.

Leveling the acreage early this spring would leave the summer and into the fall to recruit help to run underground electrical lines and everything else needed to get closer on a $1 million project looking to come together with hands-on muscle from family, friends and obliging businesses that could cut away from other work.

For Milestone, Cochran said, the promise was to do as much as it could, “when we’re not busy.” Road construction season starts in earnest next week, meaning all-in and all-out on contracts from April 1 until Thanksgiving. So, Cochran said the heavy equipment had to head out to other jobs.

“Until maybe we get a lull and can get back up there,” Cochran said. “We want nothing more than to see Mike make this dream come true for the girls, as it should.”

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For Patty, the scene was another moment to appreciate what’s being done by the hands of so many, while trying to figure out how to get the next step done on a $1 million dream without having to cut a check.

“Slow and steady will get it done,” Patty said.

That’s been the game since the Pattys met in the spring of 2017 at the Delphi home of Eric and Diane Erskin, grandparents of Abby Williams.

The families were bound on Feb. 13, 2017, when Abby and Libby, friends from Delphi Community Middle School, were dropped off at the Freedom Bridge, the entry point to the popular Monon High Bridge Trail, to spend an unseasonably warm winter day off school. When the girls didn’t return to meet their ride home, the search lasted into the next morning, until their bodies were found about a half-mile up Deer Creek from the abandoned Monon High Bridge rail trestle.

The investigation that followed brought hundreds of local, state and federal investigators to Delphi, as well as national news coverage about the search for Abby and Libby’s killer. Thousands of tips and leads later, the case is still open 25 months later. Police have arrested no suspect.

As donations in the names of Abby and Libby rolled in from motorcycle rides and assorted fundraisers, the families initially thought about putting the money toward new bleachers or a scoreboard for a softball field where the girls played. As the account grew, so did the idea.

The families started talking at the Erskins’ home about what eventually would become the L&A Park Foundation, a nonprofit with its own board dedicated to building a park, including three ball fields, an amphitheater and playgrounds.

“That day, someone came into our county and raised havoc on what we know of this community,” Eric Erskin said earlier this week, as Milestone’s GPS-guided bulldozer and one of the scrapers took coordinated laps.

“It’s really personal for us,” Erskin said. “But there are members of this community who maybe didn’t know the girls all that much who were victimized, too. Innocence was lost. Innocence was taken away. This is never going to bring our girls back. It’ll never take away the trauma for everyone else, either. But this is a time where we decided evil won’t be the thing people remember.”

The park foundation picked up 19.4 acres at the site from the state, after Patty texted a direct plea to Gov. Eric Holcomb on a line given to the family during the investigation. The land, scoped out by Patty and valued at $31,200 in Beacon, a property records database, was state right of way left from the Hoosier Heartland Highway project. The state gave it to the park foundation.

Another donation was smaller, from the neighboring Horn family, and was used for an entrance to the park site off Indiana 218.

After weeks last summer of clearing logs and plucking rocks the size of watermelons from a ditch with a borrowed backhoe to make way for that driveway, Patty watched as a crew of Rieth-Riley Construction Co. volunteers cruised in and built a culvert and a drive.

“They really busted it out,” Patty said. “Made all the difference.”

The L&A Park Foundation figures it’s had $155,000 in in-kind donation of services, materials and labor, so far. A short list of contributors – F&K Construction, Alliance Excavating & Demolition, Fox Hauling, Miami Trucking and R.W. Gross and Associates for initial sitework and permitting, among them – is hardly short, even when not comprehensive.

The 40 & 8, a veterans group, collected bottle caps that were turned into six picnic tables and 14 park benches for the park. Playground equipment has been donated by several places. And the L&A Park Foundation lists $229,000 in available funds from assorted fundraisers. That included a black 2016 Sportster 1200 Roadster from Brandt’s Harley Davidson in Wabash, an hour northeast on the Hoosier Heartland.

Sheila Rossmann, business adviser at Brandt’s, said Play Pros, a playground company she owns, offered some equipment when she’d heard about the park. She said she knew about Abby and Libby but didn’t know Patty when he came to pick it up.

“I started asking about the girls, and I found out he was the grandfather, and it broke my heart,” Rossmann said.

Rossmann said she mentioned it to franchise owner Mike Brandt. One thing led to another, Rossmann said, and soon enough they were on the showroom floor picking out a bike, which eventually raised close to $20,000.

“We hoped it would be a challenge for other businesses,” Rossmann said.

The park foundation lists it needs to raise more than another $590,000 to fully stock the park.

Erskin said the foundation has sent more than 100 grant proposals and letters. He said foundation members found out quickly that a new nonprofit, one without a long track record, doesn’t generate much action.

“We’re still at it,” Erskin said. “And we’ll stay at it.”

Same goes, he said, with the sort of donation of time and equipment from companies willing and able to do some heavy lifting at the site.

“People talk in the barber shop or the beauty shop – it’s a small town, you know – so, we know everyone drives by and wonders if we’ve even been doing anything out here,” Erskin said. “I can tell you we’re doing all kinds of things, even if it’s clearing brush. But nothing shows it like those big machines moving dirt and really getting things ready. That’s why it’s been such a big deal having these guys from Milestone.”

Erskin said the park foundation was hoping to turn that sort of work into more from other companies moved to help. (Cochran said the site is GPS-ready, in case other companies are looking to take on part of the earth-moving job left to finish.)

Erskin said there are no games scheduled, no park opening date set. Though, the retired auto mechanics teacher at Ivy Tech Community College talked about his granddaughter’s teammates getting to play there.

In the pictures in his head, he said, Abby is an eighth-grader, the way she was the last time he saw her.

So, he stops to do the math, standing there in the freshly graded dirt a few hundred yards from the corner of the Hoosier Heartland Highway and Indiana 218, about where the amphitheater will go. Erskin said that when he runs into some of Abby’s former classmates from Delphi Community Middle School, he’s taken by how they’ve changed, the way kids do over the first two years of high school.

“Time kind of gets away from you, sometimes,” Erskin said, as the GPS-guided bulldozer made another pass.

The point he’s trying to make, Erskin said, is that he’s not sure when his granddaughter’s friends from eighth grade, now sophomores, will age out of the sort of softball games that will be played on the three fields being at the Abby and Libby Memorial Park. And, nearly two years into this project, he’s not exactly sure when – given the amount of work still in front of a do-it-yourself, brush-clearing, fundraising crew of family and friends and local companies – that first pitch will be.

“But it’s going to happen,” Erskin said. “I’m never going to see my granddaughter play here. But we’re doing all we can to say we saw our grandkids’ classmates play here. And, if we live long enough, we’re going to see their kids play here. …

“Right now, when you Google ‘Delphi,’ it comes up ‘Delphi murders.’ And that’s awful,” Erskin said. “One day, you’re going to Google Delphi, and it’s going to say, ‘Delphi concert at the Abby & Libby Park.’ ‘Delphi softball tournament sign-up.’ That’s what we’re going to build here for our two girls.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Donations may be made to the L&A Park Foundation at 3348 W. County Road 500 North, Delphi, IN, 46923; online via the Community Foundation of Carroll County at www.cfcarroll.org; or at Security Federal Savings Bank in Delphi. For more information about L&A Park Foundation, go to abbyandlibbymemorialpark.org.

ABOUT THE CASE

THE SUSPECT: Police continue to look for a white male between 5-foot-6 and 5-foot-10, weighing 180 to 200 pounds, with reddish brown hair. The description was taken from images on Libby German’s cellphone of a man walking across Monon High Bridge that day – wearing blue jeans, a blue jacket and a hat – and from composite done by an FBI sketch artist, based on information from a witness who saw a man fitting that description.

► TIPS: Anyone with information about the case may call the Delphi Homicide Investigation Tip Line at 844-459-5786; the Indiana State Police at 800-382-7537; the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department at 765-564-2413; or by email to Abbyandlibbytip@cacoshrf.com.

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.