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\nHelen Marie had promised to be right back.<\/p>\n
\nHelen Marie had promised to be right back.<\/p>\n
So when the light began to fade on that sunny June day and our 16-year-old daughter still wasn\u2019t home, my husband, John, jumped in his truck to go look for her. Helen Marie had gone rollerblading on the bike path near our home, and John knew her route.<\/p>\n
While it was unusual for our daughter to be late \u2013 she\u2019d promised to help our younger son with his homework that afternoon \u2013 John was not yet imagining the worst.<\/p>\n
Then, a few blocks from home, he came upon a public service truck blocking the road. When John said he was looking for his daughter, who\u2019d gone rollerblading, he was asked to pull over and wait. Someone wanted to talk to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease,\u201d my husband silently prayed, \u201cjust let her be hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n
A police officer approached my husband. Much later, we learned he was David Greenwell, a traffic homicide investigator with the Miami-Dade Police Department.<\/p>\n
He carried a Polaroid picture. \u201cIs this your daughter?\u201d<\/p>\n
The girl in the image was dead. John shook his head. He did not recognize Helen Marie, not like that. Greenwell radioed for the medical examiner\u2019s van, which now carried her body.<\/p>\n
John watched as they opened the back door, rolled out a gurney, and lifted a white sheet from her face. John had watched similar scenes play out dozens of times on TV crime shows. But it was nothing like this. Nothing like this at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no longer any room for fooling myself. There was no room for any doubt or questions,\u201d John recalls. \u201cThere she was. She was dead, in front of me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Helen Marie was almost home when a 17-year-old driver, high on marijuana, drunk on tequila and driving twice the posted speed lost control of her car and veered onto the bike path, killing her instantly.<\/p>\n
Shock and grief blurred the minutes and hours that followed. But John remembers the white sheet, the sticks, and leaves in Helen Marie\u2019s blonde hair, the bruises from the blunt force trauma that killed her. He remembers that he didn\u2019t touch her and that he never again got the chance.<\/p>\n
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