A popular local Go-Go group held a benefit concert Tuesday to raise money in support of Selina Brown‘s young child, Kodie, who was shot along with her mother in Dec. 2012, WJLA reports.
Brown was killed in that attack and Kodie survived. Brown’s boyfriend, also Kodie’s father, was suspected in the shooting. He later committed suicide in Hempstead, N.Y.
WJLA reports that MPD officer Derrick Ferguson and his wife Roshann, Kodie’s grandparents, have taken custody of Kodie.
Kodie is 22 months old and her face was grazed by a bullet during the shooting. Ferguson told WJLA that Kodie will need reconstructive surgery for her face and also may require psychological therapy.
Reports WJLA:
[Ferguson] says a once happy little girl has become a child who frequently lashes out in anger and can no longer sleep very long.
“We’ve seen emotions from her that we’ve never seen before,” Ferguson said. “She doesn’t sleep during the night. She wakes up screaming for her mother. So it’s just real hard.”
Ferguson added that the D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier and Mayor Vincent Gray and other community leaders attended the concert to show their support.
In a December interview with Homicide Watch, Lanier called Selina Brown’s murder a “horrible, horrible crime scene.”
“That child, for the rest of her life, witnessed the murder of her mother by her father and will be permanently disfigured,” Lanier said. “How do you forget something like that?”
