Mother continues to seek justice for her daughter
Melissa and her father, Mike, share a nice moment in July 2008. It was one month before he was diagnosed with lung cancer and three months before Melissa’s incident with her boyfriend.
“Melissa’s boyfriend was never charged. The thing that really upset me was the way we were treated by the detective who was investigating it. He told us her boyfriend said he was taking care of her. But in reality, he left her lying in the bed, slowly dying, while he was going to work every day. The detective said, ‘Well, I’m sure he was probably feeding her or something.’ But how could he do that when she had a broken jaw? It just didn’t make any sense to us.
“We had a really nice memorial service for her. But when we came back home, I received the strangest phone call. It was a lady who wouldn’t give her name, and she began telling me some things about Melissa’s boyfriend. She said he was abusive to his first wife and their two children, and had pulled a gun on them. She said he was abusive to his second wife and that she had pressed charges, but they were always dropped. She’s telling me all this stuff and said, ‘You need to write a letter to the district attorney.’ So that’s what I did, and I told everything that happened. I kept waiting for a response and kept calling. About five months later he finally called. He said that while he believed Melissa’s boyfriend did it, he didn’t feel he had enough evidence to take it to trial.
“I wrote more letters to everybody I could think of: the senator of North Carolina, the congressman and the attorney general. But everybody said they had to go with the district attorney’s decision. And a couple years ago, when a new district attorney came in, I wrote a letter to him. But he said the same thing: ‘Even though I feel he’s guilty, I don’t feel like I have enough evidence to charge him.’
“We have never been able to get justice for Melissa. But one thing I do every year in December is write a letter to her boyfriend. I send pictures of her, how she looked. I will never let him forget what he did to her. He gets to live each day. She doesn’t get to see her children. She doesn’t get to see her family. She doesn’t have another Christmas. She doesn’t have another birthday. And he gets to keep on living. I don’t even know if he reads my letters. But as long as I’m here, I will never let him forget what he did to my daughter.”
— Marian Mims
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