Washington D.C.–Pictures of Nardyne Jefferies and her daughter, Brishell, who was murdered three years ago, hang from the stairway Jefferies walks up everyday.
Nardyne Jefferies keeps an old Dominos pizza box stowed away in her refrigerator. It helps her remember her daughter, Brishell Jones, who was murdered three years ago.
“That was the last meal she had the night before she died,” Jefferies said. “I can’t bear to throw it away.”
Jones was killed in a shooting that took the lives of two other teenagers. She was 16-years-old.
For the past ten years the District of Columbia has seen a decline in murder rate, recently down from 31.5 murders per 100,000 residents in 2008, to 13.9 last year. The majority of victims, though, remain young, not even old enough to rent a car.
Homicide Watch D.C. statistics show that this past year the most common ages for victims of homicide were 22 and 24, and almost two-thirds of all murder victims were in their 20s or 30s when they died.
For the families of these slain, the pain of violent crime is compounded by the tragedy of opportunity lost. But the mothers, who share a profound bond with the dead, experience a loss like no other.
Cynthia Dawkins, mother of murdered community activist, Timothy Dawkins, said that the pain of losing her son has made her feel like less of a person.
“It feels like a part of my body is missing,” Cynthia Dawkins said. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Vanessa Gates, mother of slain daughter Tiffany Gates, said that the passing of her daughter more than five years ago changed who she was.
“I wasn’t the same person. I couldn’t go out, or do anything besides going to work and going home,” Vanessa Gates said. “I still think about her everyday.”
For Jefferies, the loss of her daughter Brishell is something she said she will never get over.
“It’s been more than three years since it happened, but no matter what I do, I will never be able to move on,” Jefferies said. “I can’t bring her back, and that’s the only thing that will make me feel better.”
These mothers experienced an unimaginable loss the day their children died, a loss that continues with the grief they experience everyday. Their grief, like other DC mothers of murdered children, is an ongoing ever-changing journey of pain, remembrance and hope.
Missing Pieces
“At first it was like I was on a roller coaster that no on else was on. But now its like everything around me is moving in slow motion.”
-Cynthia Dawkins, mother of slain community activist, Timothy Dawkins
Dawkins gazes at a portrait made to remember her son, Timothy, who was shot and killed in August. Next to his face, the painting reads, “Mentor, Prophet, Brother, Hero, Father.”
Cynthia Dawkins sits on a brown couch in her Southeast D.C. one-bedroom apartment, cradling her three-month-old granddaughter, Alayah, in her lap, one hand loosely wrapped around the child’s stomach.
Swaying left to right, she stares blankly at the wooden floor beneath her as she talks about her son, Timothy Dawkins.
“He loved to sing all the time,” Cynthia Dawkins said. “He had a voice that made you listen. You know, when he spoke, people would look up and take notice. He just commanded your attention.”
The youngest of five brothers, Timothy was the runt of the family. As a kid, he would play football with his oldest brother, Antwan Dupree, who remembers seeing passion in him at an early age.
“He would run really hard, and then look up at me and smile, you know, to get my approval,” Dupree said. “He grew up so fast.”
As a teenager, Timothy ditched classes a lot and dropped out of high school at the age of 17, deferring to a life on the streets instead.
“He was a victim of his environment,” Dawkins said. “A lot of the young kids were doing what they thought was cool to do.”
In an August 2008 Washington Informer article, Timothy recalls his life on the streets remembering standing on the block, smoking weed, and fighting.
“But he was mature for his age then,” Trayon White, Timothy’s best friend, said.
“He was like an old man in a teenager’s body, so in the streets they called him ‘Little Daddy.’”
Source: The Dawkins Family- Cynthia Dawkins, Timothy and his older brother, Antwan Dupree, pictured in December 1997 during Christmas. Timothy poses with a present.
To steer her son away from a life on the streets, Dawkins recalls telling Timothy that if he wasn’t going to school he had to join a job program, or “get out of my house.”
Timothy joined a Potomac Job Corps center program that targeted troubled teens, and helped to develop them as leaders in the community.
Executive Assistant in the program, Joy Stevenson, said she remembers a dramatic transformation in Timothy, and how he turned his life around.
“When he first joined us he was out there selling drugs and walking around with pockets full of money,” Stevenson said. “But Timothy embraced his faith in God, and it changed his life.”
At the age of 19, Timothy began attending seminary school in Maryland at the Spirit of Faith Bible Institute, to become a pastor. He also married his then girlfriend, Kanasha Scott.
Timothy was 21 when Scott gave birth to their son, Ezekiel. Around this time Dawkins said Timothy became involved in the community as a youth mentor.
“He wanted to be a part of changing the community for the better,” Dawkins said.
Timothy was also interested in local politics.
Said Dawkins, “He would stay up watching C-Span, and all these other city council meetings that nobody ever watches.”
In the fall of 2012, Timothy volunteered in the campaign for Anita Bonds, a candidate for D.C. Council member At-Large.
Bonds won the special election, and Timothy began to network within the political ranks of his community, meeting people like Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), and Tracy Martin, activist and father of slain Florida teen, Trayvon Martin.
Source: Trayon White-Timothy (right), White (left) and Georgia Congressman John Lewis.
Timothy met White, a Ward 8 School Board Member, for the first time at a local McDonalds restaurant.
“I knew Tim’s brother, and he had been trying to call me so he could get involved with some school board stuff,” White said. “But I only respond to text.”
White, 29, said Timothy was special.
“There aren’t many male role models in our community, that do the right thing,” White said. “People like Tim don’t come along often. He was working to change his community, be a mentor to the youth. I mean young kids are dying out here everyday.”
Timothy was 24 when he was shot and killed on August 21 around 7:00 p.m., in front of the Southeast D.C. apartment building where he lived with his youngest sister, Dede. He died six days before his son’s third birthday.
Todd Green, a suspect in the shooting, is held on suspicion of Timothy’s murder.
At a preliminary hearing in September, MPD Detective Michael Murphy testified that Timothy might not have been the intended target of the shooting.
Surveillance footage from the apartment complex shows two other men exchanging gunfire and Timothy falling to the ground. Green was identified as a suspect when a police officer watched the surveillance video and identified him as the man shooting in Timothy’s direction.
Police have not confirmed whether or not Timothy knew either shooter, court documents state. Green remains held pending a grand jury investigation.
Cynthia Dawkins sits by a window in her Southeast D.C. apartment, looking at pictures of her slain son, Timothy. Here she holds up a picture from Timothy’s Instagram page.
Since her son’s death, Dawkins has had trouble letting go.
“Ever since he died, things have just been so different for me,” Dawkins said. “He was my baby boy, and he always will be.”
On a typical day it is hard for Dawkins to get out of bed. She says she often lay awake thinking of her remaining six children, hoping that what happened to Timothy, doesn’t happen to them.
Since her son’s death, Dawkins quit her job. It is difficult for her to go outside because she says everything reminds her of Timothy.
“At first it was like I was on a roller coaster that no on else was on,” Dawkins said. “But now its like everything around me is moving in slow motion.”
Psychologists call these feelings, symptoms of depression. But for Dawkins it is now her life in waiting. So she waits for the time when the feelings of emptiness will end.
“I’m trying to stay active. I hope that it helps,” Dawkins said.
An Uneasy Feeling
“One day I smiled, and I stopped because I just felt so guilty for being able to smile, and knowing that Brishell is not able to smile. I felt guilty, and I still feel guilty for just day-to-day pleasures.”
-Nardyne Jefferies, mother of slain teenager, Brishell Jones
The Dominos pizza box dated the day before the murder, when Brishell and her friends ordered food for dinner. It has been in Nardyne Jefferies fridge more than three years.
Jefferies lives alone in a three-story townhouse in Southwest D.C., two blocks from the corner Brishell was killed.
It was the house Brishell, her only child, grew up.
“I would hear her running down the stairs on the phone with her little friends,” Jefferies recalled. “She would just start picking at whatever I was cooking in the kitchen, and she would say ‘Mommy what is this? It tastes so good.’ She loved food.”
Jefferies often took Brishell out for a ride on her motorcycle; sometimes riding out of the city to bike club events Jefferies would regularly attend.
At a winter holiday party Jefferies remembers her daughter staying inside with her, instead of playing outside in the snow with the other kids.
“Brishell did not like to get dirty,” Jefferies said. “She was a real girly girl. Prissy, and she loved Hello Kitty. I mean it was Hello Kitty everything for her.”
For Jefferies, Brishell was not just her daughter, but also her friend.
She recalls late nights with Brishell eating sweets, and watching scary movies till they both fell asleep.
“She was good with technology and I used to tease her because I didn’t know how to work the DVD player,” Jefferies said. “She’d say, ‘Mommy you’re going to have to learn this stuff, I’m not always going to be here.’ And she was right.”
Jefferies keeps her daughter’s room exactly the way she left it. Here she lays out some of the things that Brishell loved the most; Hello Kitty products, and a picture of her niece.
The night before Brishell was killed, Jefferies said Brishell invited some of her girlfriends over to their house for a sleepover. The next day the group of girls planned to attend Jordan Howe’s funeral, a mutual friend who was shot and killed the previous week.
Jefferies recalls seeing one of Brishell’s friends wear a T-shirt with a picture of Howe crouched down over a pile of money, giving Jefferies an “uneasy feeling” about her daughter attending Howe’s funeral the next day.
“I just felt like something bad was going to happen,” she said.
The next day, Jefferies said, started out as a typical day at their house. It was a Tuesday, and Jefferies got ready for work, as Brishell was getting ready to go to Howe’s funeral.
“So you know we hugged and said love you,” Jefferies said. “And that was the last time I saw Brishell, March 30, 2010. The worst day of my life.”
Brishell attended the funeral, and then headed back home at around 5:30 p.m. She called her mother to let her know she was ok.
“I was so relieved when she called. I just thought, thank God, because I had been praying all day long, harder than normal, I was like ‘please let my daughter be safe,’” Jefferies said.
From work, Jefferies went to the gym to workout with the mother of one of Brishell’s friends.
While at the gym, Jefferies said that Brishell called her again, asking if she could walk up the street to return a backpack her friend left at their house during the previous night’s sleep over.
Jefferies recalls telling Brishell to, “Go up. Do what you got to do, and come right back. No chitchatting no conversing, none of that.”
It would be the last time she would talk to her daughter.
Jefferies sits on her living room couch holding a picture she took of Brishell at the hospital, the night she was killed. “I want to show people what really happened to my daughter. This isn’t a cookie-cutter story. This is the way she died,” Jefferies said.
“I started working out, and I just started getting that overwhelming feeling again. I cut my workout short and said ‘I need to go.’ I don’t know what it was but I just, I needed to go get to my daughter,” Jefferies said.
She tried to call Brishell, but she never answered.
Jefferies then suddenly heard her friend’s phone at the gym begin to ring. Her friend answered and Jefferies heard the woman’s daughter screaming on the other end. She was yelling, “everybody is dead.
“I just snatched the phone from her and said, ‘Where’s Brishell?’ and she just screamed ‘She’s dead. Brishell’s dead,” Jefferies recalls.
Brishell was found on the 4000 block of South Capitol St. Southeast unconscious, and suffering from gunshot wounds. An ambulance took her to Washington Hospital Center where she would be pronounced dead.
Jefferies later found out that her daughter was with a group of her friends, who were mourning the death of Howe near a street corner he once frequented.
Court documents state that the shooting was the culmination of a weeks worth of neighborhood violence that started over a bracelet.
Howe was shot and killed by Sanquan Carter and his brother Orlando, after they opened fire at a party when Sanquan Carter believed someone had stolen his bracelet.
The following day Orlando Carter was shot in the head and shoulder by an unidentified shooter. He survived his injuries but sought revenge on Howe’s friends, whom he believed had shot him.
The evening after Howe’s funeral, Orlando Carter rented a silver Chrysler minivan and drove with four other young males, to 4022 South Capitol St. Southeast where they opened fire on a group of Howe’s friends who were mourning his death.
Three people were killed, including Brishell. An autopsy revealed that she died from a bullet wound to the head.
Last year Orlando Carter, and two other suspects in the shooting were sentenced to life in prison.
Jefferies grasps a picture of her daughter Brishell, that she keeps draped over the chandelier atop her dinner table. Jefferies said they ate dinner together every night.
Since the shooting, Jefferies has had trouble doing things that were once commonplace.
Jefferies often avoids cooking, because she knows she will no longer hear the “little pitter-patter” of her daughter’s feet anxiously running down the stairs to taste a meal she has prepared.
At night she is unable to sleep and is often kept awake after constantly checking her phone for a text message, or phone call, hoping her daughter would finally respond to the call she never answered the day she died.
Watching television shows and eating chocolates that her daughter adored makes Jefferies feel guilty.
“One day I smiled, and I stopped because I just felt so guilty for being able to smile, and knowing that Brishell is not able to smile. I felt guilty, and I still feel guilty for just day-to-day pleasures,” Jefferies said.
Pictures of Brishell adorn the hallways, staircases and bedroom walls of Jefferies’ home. One picture hangs on the chandelier above her living room dining table.
Jefferies keeps the picture there so she can still have dinner with her daughter, every night.
“I know she’s dead, but sometimes I need to be able to look at her face, just to remember what it looked like,” Jefferies said. “This is still her home.”
Dropping out of life
“I was afraid to go outside, because it felt like people could see right through me. It was like they could see through my skin.”
-Vanessa Gates mother of slain daughter, Tiffany Gates
Vanessa Gates sits in a park next to the Foggy Bottom Metro station. She remembers walking through that park with her daughter, Tiffany Gates, on the way to her doctor.
When Vanessa Gates’ daughter, 33-year-old Tiffany Gates, was murdered in the fall of 2008, Gates made her Maryland home a place of refuge for her daughter’s belongings.
Gates’ son, Charles Gates, would come home from school to a maze of boxes filled with his sister’s stuff.
“He would just walk around everything,” Gates said. “I’d put her clothes in his closet, and he wouldn’t say a word.”
Her daughter’s belongings became a stagnant train of boxes, tracked throughout Gates’ house.
In Gates’ closet, she kept a box of Tiffany’s clothes. Gates often opened it to see what it smelled like, trying to remember her daughter’s scent.
It took two years for Gates to let go of all the things that her daughter left behind. October marked the fifth year since Tiffany was stabbed and killed by her ex-boyfriend, Roderick Ridley.
Gates said she can finally talk about her grief.
“I dropped out of life for a while,” Gates said. “But now I think things have gotten a little better for me. I realized as long as I remember my daughter, she will always be with me.”
Tiffany loved music. Her father, Michael Jackson, said Tiffany auditioned for the Julliard School of Dance, but a twisted ankle kept her from being accepted.
“She was always smiling and dancing. She was the glue of the family, she knew how to bring people together,” Jackson said. “That man killed her because he knew he lost something special.”
Vanessa Gates says that her daughter Tiffany loved to write. Pictured above is a T-shirt Tiffany made for members of her family. Printed on the shirt is a poem she wrote.
Tiffany Gates and Roderick Ridley began dating in the summer of 2007. One year later, Ridley set the inside of Gates’ Southeast DC apartment on fire.
Police arrested Ridley and he was ordered not to contact her.
But according to police, while in jail Ridley called Gates more than 400 times in one month, threatening to kill her, and pleading with her not to cooperate as a witness in his arson case. Gates would eventually comply with Ridley’s demands, and he was released to a halfway house.
He escaped on October 28, 2008.
Less than a month after his escape, Ridley showed up on Gates’ doorstep. She called the police and a member of the U.S. Marshals Service to tell them that Ridley was outside of her apartment.
She also called her mother.
“I was on the phone with her when she said he was outside bothering her car,” Vanessa Gates said. “I told her I was going to come down there but she told me to stay home because I had work the next day, and that was the last time I talked to her.”
Court documents state that when police arrived at the apartment, they were unable to get into the building, but Ridley had already entered. Ridley kicked in Tiffany Gates’ apartment door and used a knife to fatally stab her.
A neighbor heard Gates scream, and then saw Ridley run away. Moments later, Gates knocked on the neighbor’s door and collapsed from multiple stab wounds to the face. Ridley was found in a vacant apartment nearby.
In June 2011, a jury found Ridley guilty of burglary, carrying a dangerous weapon, multiple counts of obstruction of justice, contempt and making threats. But the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the second-degree murder charge.
Judge Gerald Fisher, though, sentenced Ridley to more than 70 years, giving him the maximum sentence for each charge Ridley was found guilty of, to be served in prison consecutively.
Vanessa Gates sits in a George Washington University park looking at the camera after glancing over at a girl tying her shoe. “Everything reminds me of Tiffany,” she said.
In the years following her daughter’s death, Gates placed blame on the police department and U.S. Marshals Service. She filed a suit that claimed the agencies had negligently failed to meet their law enforcement duties by letting Ridley escape, and by failing to protect Tiffany.
“They didn’t do their job the way they should have,” Gates said. “They were supposed to have a police car parked out there to protect her. I mean they already knew he had escaped, so why weren’t they there?”
Despite the anger Gates feels toward the way her daughter was killed, she acknowledges that her pain has lessened in the years since the murder.
“I was afraid to go outside, because it felt like people could see right through me. It was like they could see through my skin,” Gates said. “Now it’s gotten better, but I will still never be the same.”
Understanding Grief
Stephanie Handel adjusts items on a shelf in her Cleveland Park office. They are used for therapy sessions. Her clients use them to create a representation of what their world is.
“Grief is about the relationship you have with a person,” Stephanie Handel, a therapist for the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing, said. “When you no longer have that relationship, you grieve it, and that’s what grieving is all about.”
Handel works to help families in D.C. deal with the grief that comes with losing a child to murder.
The grief, Handel said, is most challenging for the mothers.
“A mother who has carried a child for nine months, raised that child from a young age, has that intense, intense connection with them,” Handel said. “So when someone chooses to hurt that child, to violently kill them, it’s such a sudden, and unimaginable loss.”
But what does that loss look like?
Dr. Joan Arnold, co-author of “A Child Dies: A Portrait of Parental Grief,” has done clinical work and research on grieving parents for over 40 years.
“People do what they do to survive,” Arnold said. “Some people do grieve openly, some people don’t even let anyone else into the room. Others strip everything away and move, to find a new place to live because they can’t stand the memories.”
For mothers to survive the death of a murdered child, Arnold said, they must find a way to remember their child, while searching for meaning and purpose in their grief.
But to find meaning in the murder of your child can be a difficult task, especially when the death of the young, as with DC homicide victims, is commonplace.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2006 to 2010, over 270 murder victims in D.C. were between ages 10 to 24. Over those same five years, the combined average murder rate for that subject age group was 43; more than twice the rate for D.C. residents of all ages.
Marcy Rinker, Family advocate with the US Attorney’s Office, sits at her desk looking at pictures of murdered victims. Rinker has supported hundreds of families over the years.
Marcy Rinker, a Family Advocate for the US Attorney’s Office, has worked with mothers of murdered children through the court system for over 30 years.
Rinker sits through court cases with mothers, makes home visits, and keeps her cell phone accessible to her clients at all times of the day, giving them someone to talk to whenever their grief becomes unbearable.
Pictures, Rinker said, are important.
“The pictures are a way for these mothers to stay connected with their child after their death,” Rinker said. “They are little memories, freeze frames that allow a mother to remember their child the way they want to remember them.”
Those memories, Rinker said, at times, are the only things that help mothers get through those initial days after the death; days that, for some mothers, have become a struggle.
Handel calls the initial months following the death of a child the, “year of survival.” Mothers will often be unable to do daily tasks, and live in what Handel calls “a fog of smoke.
“Why do what you did before? It didn’t keep your child alive. Why function at all? It doesn’t bring your child back,” Handel said. “It’s a senseless, hopeless feeling that you feel you’ll never ever be whole again.”
In addition to hopelessness, guilt and blame, Dr. Arnold said, are common emotions mothers experience in the wake of their child’s death.
“Parents are responsible for the life of their children,” Arnold said. “So you’re endowed with the responsibility of this child forever, and if they were to die, you would feel guilt, that it was your fault, that you couldn’t protect them. You would feel that in everything.”
Dr. Arnold said when a mother places blame on anyone besides the murderer, it is a natural sense of injustice that the mother feels after the abrupt loss of her child.
“There’s also a sense that they were good parents, and loved their child. So why are they experiencing this agony?” Arnold said. “There’s no justice to it, there’s nothing that makes sense about it. For them, it’s senseless.”
But from something so senseless as murder, Arnold said, mothers can turn into a meaningful purpose in their lives.
Moving on
Nardyne Jefferies slams a metal mallet down against a flattened gun that will soon be a shovel, at the Washington National Cathedral. Jefferies enjoys anti-violence events.
Butterflies remind Nardyne Jefferies of her daughter.
“When I see butterflies now I feel a sense of calmness because she loved butterflies,” Jefferies said. “She would say a butterfly starts off as this ugly cocoon, then it transforms and changes inside the cocoon and comes out a beautiful butterfly.”
The years after Brishell’s death, Jefferies said she has not found closure and thinks she probably never will. She continues to grieve and live a life without her daughter.
But Jefferies said she has found purpose in her loss and has transformed anger toward the assault rifle that killed her daughter into advocacy and activism toward a change in gun policy.
“I try to get out there and get as many people as I can out there on the Hill, or wherever we are, to speak out and tell their stories of how guns have ruined their lives,” Jefferies said.
Jefferies has also worked on local policy with D.C. Council member David Catania, policies that would help eliminate truancy and provide mental health awareness in D.C. public schools.
“These little boys out here with their pants sagging below their waists, they need to stop with all this violence and ‘This is my street’ mentality,” Jefferies said. “They need to have more ambition beyond the block they live on.”
Advocacy in the midst of death and grief, Stephanie Handel said, can give a mother meaning and a reason to show the world who their child was, and what happened to them.
“You know we love those mothers out there with fire in their bellies talking about their experiences, and fighting for a cause that gives the death of their child some kind of purpose,” Handel said.
Vanessa Gates has found a cause in domestic violence prevention, and takes time out of the year to talk to battered women’s groups and organizations, to tell them the story of her daughter, Tiffany Gates.
“It’s really something I care about because I myself have been the victim of domestic violence,” Gates said. “And I hope that my story could help another woman leave a situation she needs to get out of.”
Cynthia Dawkins, who used to work for Metro Access, has recently taken up substitute teaching at D.C. elementary schools.
“I have a Masters in social work, and it’s something I really care about,” Dawkins said. “Timothy cared so much for young black men in our community. He wanted to change the stigma behind them.”
Dawkins has also started “The Timothy Dawkins Project,” an organization that will focus on educating and developing leaders in the community, from a young age.
“We want to raise funds for the project to target youth as young as 6-years-old,” Dawkins said. “The earlier we can educate these children on violence prevention and leadership skills, the better chance they’ll have to succeed.”
Dawkins prepares the handouts for her meeting for “The Timothy Dawkins Project.”
Dr. Arnold said that groups, started in the name of their murdered child, give mothers an outlet to express their thoughts and feelings, while building a legacy that will live on.
“It’s similar to a memorial,” Arnold said. “You know they create a foundation to do work in their community and it brings meaning to their child’s death. It also allows the mother to remind people who their child was. To remember them.”
But for Jefferies, the work she does is more than finding a way to remember Brishell. It is about maintaining the connection she has to her daughter.
“Sometimes I feel like her spirit is moving through me, because I’m craving the things she loved so much,” Jefferies said.
On a cold Sunday morning in October, Jefferies stands outside the Washington National Cathedral. She is at an event for the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group that has continued to push for gun control policy around the nation.
In the front of the church a farmer displays some unloaded pistols and rifles delivered to him by D.C. police officers. The firearms were confiscated from unlicensed gun owners.
They were going to be turned into garden tools.
Jefferies approached a rifle that was scorched with a blowtorch, and slammed a metal mallet down onto the gun repeatedly. Sparks flew into the air with each downward swing until she thrashed the weapon, unrecognizable.
Minutes later, the gun would become a shovel.
“It was like how Brishell used to talk about how the butterfly changes,” Jefferies said. “Because guns are just such an ugly thing to me, and I felt like I was beating the evil out of it. Now it’s something beautiful, and useful.”
