My daughter was trying to stop an argument between two more girls, a friend of hers and the young lady that stabbed her. And she walked up to her, and tried to . . . you know, protect and— well, how do you say—stop the fight so it wouldn’t start really, and the girl stabbed her in the neck. And it hit her aorta, and she bled to death.
Because my daughter already suffered from MS, she couldn’t fight. She couldn’t walk straight on a straight line. When I got to the hospital, they did tell me that she’d had a pulse. And, of course, that made me feel better because I knew she was . . . you know, she had life. But then a doctor came out and told me she didn’t make it. And that’s kind of when I went to pieces, I guess you might say.
I do know . . . that there are a lot of people who commit these crimes and think that they shouldn’t be held responsible—but they should, and they should be punished. Because you can’t go around taking people’s lives and not be punished.
I think the girl got 10 years. She thought she should get out because she had a son at home who needed her. And I wanted to jump up and say something, but that big son of mine was with me, and he held me down because we wasn’t supposed to talk, really. And I wanted to tell, “yes, my daughter had a mother at home that needed her, but she couldn’t have her.”
If she ever comes to court again, or tries to get out on parole again, I want to be there, too, because even though I know I won’t get my daughter again, I miss her. If people just realized how it hurts the family of these people that they hurt . . . kill, and . . . maybe they could understand, “I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, so I can’t do it.”
But we have some people with no conscience, I guess. One year later, that my son . . . I lost my youngest son. And that didn’t help matters either. But God has been with me, and I’m doing the best I can, and I’m sure they wouldn’t want me crying every day or, you know, suffering because of them. I could hear them, “Now Mama, you got to go on. You have to live.”
So that’s what I’m trying to do.
