He vanished in Syria six years ago. His parents still fight to bring their son home

One month ago, Debra and Marc Tice flew to New York to tell the story of their son’s disappearance. In a conference room at the United Nations headquarters, in front of a dozen journalists, they projected his photograph on to a screen. It showed a young man standing on the crest of a mountain, smiling and unshaven, with a pair of sporty sunglasses crowning his messy brown hair.

“Please allow us to introduce our son Austin Tice,” Debra Tice said into a microphone.

More than six years have passed since the Tices last saw him.

In May of 2012, after graduating from Georgetown’s foreign service school and serving in the US Marine Corps, Austin set out for Syria, where he rapidly established himself as a freelance conflict reporter. His photographs and stories – for McClatchy and the Washington Post, among other outlets – described the human costs of an escalating civil war. But in August, just days after his 31st birthday, Tice’s communications abruptly stopped. To this day, his fate remains unknown.

“Six years, one month and four days ago, he was detained at a checkpoint near Damascus,” Debra Tice said, reading her statement from a rumpled piece of paper that looked as though it had been reread many times. Gently, Marc Tice placed his hand on his wife’s back. More than once, during