Victim Impact Statement
Each of us closest to Evelyn hold onto guilt about what happened that early Thursday morning.
Evelyn had asked our son to watch a movie with her. He told her he was really tired and he went to bed. He feels like he let her go.
Evelyn had asked my wife to sleep with her that night, but seeing as they were leaving for a mother/daughter trip to Mexico on Friday, my wife told her no, that I would get mad. So she feels she let Evelyn go.
Her boyfriend, Jeremiah, who was always at our house, also wasn’t there that night to keep her at home. He knows that she wouldn’t have gone if he had been there.
And me? I feel like I hold the most guilt of all. I feel like I let my daughter down by not being the kind of father she wanted, but rather being the kind of father that I thought she needed. If I were a more secure person, my wife wouldn’t have been afraid to sleep with Evelyn that night, if I had been more supportive of Evelyn. If I… if I… if I…, if I had only done more.
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My wife, a happy go lucky type, always with a smile on her face now is in despair. We are seeing a grief counselor. However, I am afraid I will never see that bubbly personality that I fell in love with so many years ago. Gillespie robbed her of all of the things that mothers and daughters are supposed to do. She now suffers from depression and constant anxiety attacks and requires medication for these attacks. Some nights she wakes up screaming.
She remembers over 20 years ago when she got pregnant and I was so happy that I to call everyone and tell the whole world that I was going to be a daddy. She remembers how I even tried to call my mother-in-law and try to do it in Spanish it was so funny. When Evelyn was born I was the first one to hold her in my arms. I was so proud of being a new daddy. Evy was so fragile and beautiful that my wife cried when she was able to hold her. As the years went by, she became a beautiful young woman and a model; she was my wife’s world, her little princess, her shopping partner, her fashion consultant and her friend.
Evelyn was a very beautiful young girl that had many dreams that she shared with my wife. One of her dreams was to make it big as a Victoria Secret model and use the money she made to build an organization to help all the teenagers that were depressed and felt lost or wanted to better themselves. That was Evelyn’s dream. A dream that was crushed the day she died. On that night, everyone’s life changed.
Every day after my wife picked her up from school or work, they would talk for hours in the car while sitting in the driveway of our house. They would talk about her dreams, her goals, her sadness and secrets, she would tell her everything. Sadly the only thing she never told her was that she was going out that night. We will never know the true reason that Evelyn went out that night. Even knowing wouldn’t change anything.
As a mother, she will suffer for the rest of her life and she will never be able to hold or kiss Evy or see her getting married or having grandchildren. Like all of our family and the people who loved Evelyn very much we will miss her forever. As Evelyn was fond of saying, and it is now the phrase that marks her niche cover in Ft. Rosecrans, “Forever is a long time.”