It’s been more than 30 years, but the community refuses to forget Elisa Nelson.
"She was very smart,” friend Donna Donati-Waddell said. “She loved to help people. She was the kind of kid who would put kids on her bike and ride them to the library and help them learn to read."
Elisa was the only girl on her baseball team. She was a Girl Scout and did gymnastics and cheerleading. Her brother called her a born leader; whatever she did, her friends followed.
But the 10-year-old’s life was cut short in 1980 when she was abducted while riding her bike to Palm Harbor Middle School and killed.
"Those kinds of things just didn’t happen,” Elisa’s brother, Jeff Nelson, said. “You lived in a great place and all of the sudden you didn’t live in a great place anymore."
After more than three decades of appeals, Elisa’s killer was executed in 2013. Her friends and family met at Palm Harbor Middle School in 2014 for a memorial and decided it was time to start healing.
“Back then we didn’t have counselors to talk about this stuff so we all kind of stuffed it and we carried memories, but coming together it was like we are 10 again and it was a very emotional experience with us and we said we need to do something to help remember Elisa for what she really was and not how she died,” Donati-Waddell said.
That’s how Elisa’s Greatest Wishes was born. The foundation honors Elisa’s memory by raising money for causes near to her heart, like the Pinellas Education Foundation, Make-a-Wish, Girl Scouts and the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Saturday, Elisa’s Greatest Wishes held a fundraising 5k and Fun Run with the help of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. It’s the second run friends have planned to honor Elisa and move on from her horrible tragedy.
“Being able to cast that behind us and focus on how Elisa lived rather than how Elisa died is a huge weight off our shoulders,” Nelson said.
To learn more about Elisa's Greatest Wishes, click here.