CHARLI’S STORY
I am going to tell you about a beautiful young girl
that was taken way too soon.
Sometime in
September,1994 I found out that I was pregnant. I didn't know what I was going
to do at that moment really. I was only 17 years old and not married. I told
the father that I was pregnant and waited for him to decide what he wanted to do.
It didn’t take him long. “We decided to
have the child.”
On June 20, 1995
Charli Rae Gore was born at 6:12 am. After a long night of very hard labor we
had the most beautiful little baby girl I had ever seen, 7 pounds 2 oz 19 and
1/4 inches long. Her face was all scratched up from her nails, but she was
beautiful anyways. I was the happiest mother around; I couldn’t believe that I
had just given birth to a real person, a person that we made. She loved her daddy from the start. Charli
would play peepers with him only hours old. Her first nickname was peepers
because of it. There was a bond with the two of them as soon as I told her
daddy we were going to have a baby. A bond that could not be broken, we
thought.
Through the years
she grew with leaps and bounds. She started school in August of 2000. By that
time I had 3 other children, 2 girls and 1 boy. So I had 4 children in total. I
had buried one girl at the age of 2 months 28 days old. We were getting through
everything fine, a lot of hard work and my little family were growing so strong
every day and I loved it.
From the day I
found out I was going to be a mother that’s all I ever wanted to be and to be
the very best at it too. I worked very hard at trying to make my family have
the best life it could, while daddy was always working hard for us.
By the time Charli
hit her teens year’s things were not going so smoothly. She had a boyfriend we
didn’t approve of and she only wanted to rebel against us for it. Her being my
oldest I had a lot of learning to do before I could see things her way. I
handled many things wrong with Charli, I shouldn’t have pushed so much and I
shouldn’t have given in too many times like I did. Through all of this, I’ve
learned that I needed to grow up just a bit more. I could have taken a
different road but I didn’t. I learned my lesson very fast with Charli she kept
me on my toes all the time. Our biggest problem with each other was Charli had
a better hold on most situations then I did. I was the mother her,the child,
but she knew more than me and I can see that now. She was so smart in many
different ways. When I couldn’t get the other 2 children to listen to me she
could. She had a better way of doing most things. In many ways, in another life
Charli should had been my mother and I her child. This caused us to fight way
too much. Charli was so very head strong too, just like her daddy. She wanted
things her way or else. If it wasn’t Charli’s way she was not happy!! I tried to give all 3 of my children everything
they wanted in life, I think that is where I went wrong with Charli, I wanted
to be more of her best friend then I wanted to be a mother. Because then I knew
maybe we wouldn’t fight so much. There were times that I was the mother she
needed or I thought so at the time. I do regret that I didn’t make better
choices from the start.
Now it’s early
2011 by this time Charli and I are not Seeing Eye to eye on a lot of things.
She wants to be grown and live on her own but she was only 15 years old and I
want her to be a kid as long as she could. Charli has started dating this new
guy from school and for the most part he was a good kid from what I could see.
But I wanted Charli to be able to finish school and keep her grades up and to
be home more. She only wanted to be with him every waking moment. So the
fighting and running away started all over again with us. Charli was so hard
headed about being her own person. I know that she wanted to be all grown up
but it was not time for that at this moment. She still had so much growing up
to still do; even though she was wise for her short life she still needed to
grow more. I did not want her to become a mother herself at a young age like I
did. I wanted so much better for my children than I had growing up. I wanted
them to be wealthy adults and not struggle with everyday life. Not to have to
worry about money like we do.
Charli had taken
off on Thursday April 14, 2011 at 7:15 am. It was not the first time she had
ran away that week. I can remember the shoes that I had just handed to her hitting
the ground. She was gone; I couldn’t even catch up to her. I went to the police
department after I got the other kids to school and filed run away charges on
Charli again for the 30th time! Like all the other times I just knew
that she would be home in a few hours. They always found her and brought her
home safe and sound. I did not know that morning was going to be the very last
time I saw my beautiful blue eyed baby girl ever again. I waited and would call
the police every few hours to see if they had found her. All I ever got was not
yet Mrs. Gore but we are looking and will call as soon as we find her. Two very
sleepless days later, I got a call from the mother of the boyfriend, she had
told me that Charli had went to her sister n laws house early that morning
around midnight to see the boyfriend. The Aunt would not let Charli see him and
told her that she was a run away and she needed to leave. In that same phone
call she was hearing from her husband who was on another phone being told that
a call just came in that there was a young woman’s body laying unresponsive in
the ditch. As she was telling me this I knew it was my child’s dead body laying
there. I don’t know how I knew but I just did. I finished getting dressed and
drove myself to the scene. I prayed that it wasn’t my child but I knew it was deep
down in my heart. I waited for the investigators to come to me and let me know
that indeed it was my child. That was the longest 3 hours of my life, I watched
them talk about what happen, measuring the scene, talking as if there wasn’t a
little girl dead in the ditch. I can remember the officer when he started talking
to me and hearing him tell me by what he could tell it was my Charli that
had been hit and killed. I know I heard him right because she was gone but my
brain was not listening. I was in so much shock, I felt my knees going weak
about to slip right out beneath me but all I could hear was blah blah blah from
the officer. I knew he was telling me what happen to Charli and I also knew
that he known her from months past. But I wanted it not to be real. I wanted my
child to be ok and to be alive. I can remember after a few moments later asking
if I could go the short distant to see my child laying in the ditch, but the
officer said that would not be a good thing for me to see. I really didn’t care
what he thought, but I needed to see for myself it was my child laying there.
As he talked about what they thought had happen to her all I could think was,
why my child? How could someone take her from me? How could they just leave her
laying there in that dirty ditch? Why didn’t they call for help? How long had
she laid there and suffered from her injuries. There was so many questions
running through my head at that moment and I couldn’t make them stop. I wanted
to hold my child so bad at that moment and they wouldn’t let me. The officer
had asked me if I drove myself and told him yes then he asked the mother
standing there with me to please drive me home. At that time I was so shaken by
what I just heard I could have never driven home. I made the call to my husband
to let him know that our child had been MURDERED. That was the hardest call I ever
had to make. To let him, her daddy, know that his child was no longer here with
us. I will never forget the look on his face when I got home that morning, him pleading
with me to not let it be so. That I had to be lying to him, that Charli was not
DEAD. I had never been so heartbroken at that moment; I never wanted to make
that call. It was the saddest look I had ever seen on his face, and I had put
it there. I know that I wasn’t the one that killed our child but I felt like I
had at that moment. I felt his pain, we had lost our first born child and we
couldn’t make her come back. Yes we had lost another child together but it wasn’t
like this. Kera had died from SIDS, something that we never knew about until it
happen. We couldn’t stop it from happening to her. But to have a child murdered
and taken from you is so much harder. You teach your children from a very young
age that there is bad people out in this world and you try to make them understand
that not all people are good. I know that I had given Charli all the tools and
understanding I could, but I didn’t think I would lose her to a murder like
this. I thought I had taught her better. I taught her how to walk on the right
side of the road when walking and how to get out of the way of moving cars when
she heard one coming up on her. I just never thought that someone would chase
her down like a rabid dog. Charli had gotten out of the way like I had taught
her to do. She was in the mid part of the driveway; out of the road enough that
they should had never hit her with the car. That is the hardest I think knowing
that they wanted to kill her for no good reason. What did she do to piss you
off so bad at her? She was only a child! Charli had never hurt anyone in her
life. She wouldn’t stand for bullying ever. She would give you the last piece
of clothes she had if that was what you wanted. She cared for everyone and
everything. She had the biggest heart I had ever seen and she loved with
everything she had in her. To have only lived a short time she had touched so
many lives already. I knew that she would have changed the world with that
heart of hers.
Charli did not deserve
to die that way, she had so much life in her still. She deserved to live a full
life and to have children of her own. To become the vet she wanted to be, she
loved animals and she wanted to make a whole life around them. She deserved to
be whatever she wanted to become.
It’s been a little
over a year now since her Murder and the persons responsible are still walking
free and have not been charged with murder. The police they only want to charge
one person with aggravated assault with deadly weapon and failure to stop and render
aide. They say they can’t prove at this time it was done on purpose. When it
all happen last year they told the news media that it was done intentionally
and they were investigating it as a murder. Now a year later they’re not
anymore, WHY? Doesn’t my child deserve to be treated like every other person in
the world or she the only one that can be left lying in a ditch dead and no one
cares, but her father and I.
I still have so
many questions about what happen that night, but I have come to realize that I
might never get to know all the answers. I will never know why my child thought
it was a good idea to leave my house and to be on that street that late at
night and why she was killed the way she was. I can’t be the only parent out
here in this world that wants answers, justice for the person’s that took a precious
child away from her family. I still
struggle with all of it and still ask so many questions but not getting to the
bottom of it all its killing me. I am in the dark; I need to know so many
things. I need to see that my child was not killed in Vain. I need piece of
mind to settle my heartache from all of this………
