When law enforcement representatives announced Feb. 27 that a suspect in Morgan Violi’s 1996 abduction and death was identified and in custody, the relief was palpable among everyone gathered at Bowling Green Police Department headquarters, including several of Morgan’s surviving family, who have been haunted by this unfathomable tragedy.

The circumstances behind the crimes were horrifying: A 7-year-old girl literally snatched up off the street by a stranger in a van, her body found one state away three months later and her abductor apparently out in the wind, unknown to police for decades.

FBI agents and Bowling Green Police Department officers fielded countless tips over the ensuing 30 years, and through dogged investigative work and technological advances in forensic analysis and DNA profiling, criminal charges have been brought against Robert Scott Froberg, who will be prosecuted on a count of kidnapping resulting in death.

“For years, the community has feared that Morgan’s abductor lived silently among us, we feared that one of our kids might be next,” said Kyle Bumgarner, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, at the news conference announcing the charges against Froberg.

Details disclosed about Froberg only add to the chilling nature of the case — authorities said Froberg was a convicted armed robber and an escapee from correctional facilities in Pennsylvania and Alabama, and was on the run when he arrived in Bowling Green in a stolen van in 1996 and drove through what was then the Colony Apartments parking lot, where Morgan was taken.

Now 61, Froberg was captured in Pennsylvania later in 1996 and has been imprisoned in Alabama ever since, and reportedly confessed to police about his role in Morgan’s abduction and death just days before the news conference held by Bumgarner, who said that Morgan’s family has “waited far too long for answers” about her death.

We’re grateful for the work of the people across several law enforcement agencies who have had a hand in identifying a suspect; it’s clear that this case has touched those investigators like few others.

Now comes the judicial process, with court proceedings to take place at the federal courthouse in Bowling Green.

As the case proceeds through the courts, it will be more important than ever for the community to hold Morgan’s family close in their thoughts, as they reckon with facing the man suspected of inflicting one of the most unconscionable crimes upon their loved one.