Maurice Dawkins Now that the holidays are behind us most of us are looking ahead and thinking about the hopes and expectations we have for the new decade. But one South Carolina father is still mired in a past of horror and sadness.

Maurice Dawkins is still dealing with the violent 2006 murder of his 18–year–old daughter Crystal.

Crystal had gone out to California to visit her mother for the Thanksgiving holiday after he and her stepmother had separated, Dawkins said. He began to suspect something was wrong when he couldn’t get in touch with her by phone, and then her boss from a local fast food restaurant called to say she hadn’t reported for work after she was due to return to South Carolina.

Crystal’s stepmother then told Dawkins Crystal had called her and was upset that her mother’s boyfriend was always hanging around the Lancaster, California, house and had been so verbally abusive that the two women had gone to the sheriff to report him. After he said he was denied being able to file a missing persons report by phone, Dawkins then decided to head to California in search of his daughter.

Crystal Dawkins “The police didn’t believe me,” Dawkins said. “They kept saying she probably was a runaway. So I searched on my own.”

Almost four weeks into the search that Dawkins said took him all over Los Angeles and to Las Vegas, police made the gruesome discovery that both Crystal and her mother, 41–year–old Christine Bacon, were found shot to death in the mother’s Antelope Valley, California, home.

Christopher Anthony Brown, 39, was arrested January19, 2008, and charged with both murders and if found guilty will face the death penalty. Brown was also a central figure in an Arizona drug dealing case, according to Lancaster news reports.

Brown is slated to face trial in February, and Dawkins has always planned to go and to be a witness for the prosecution. Reliving his daughter’s murder won’t be easy, but he said it was something he felt he had to do.

“People tell me it will give me closure, but I can never close the door on my daughter’s death,” he said. “But it will help to know that the killer is going to pay for taking her life.”

Dawkins, a former Jamaican detective and now a Columbia resident, recalls the time of the murder and said it was one of the hardest times of his life. And for him, that’s saying something. In 1989, he was arrested due to a mistaken identity and ended up homeless. He said that while living in New York’s streets, he was approached by law enforcement officials seeking a street informant. He agreed to help them. He said he infiltrated several crime rings. Later, he said he was the star witness in a trial that led to a major drug dealer’s conviction and a life sentence.

“I’ve been through a lot in my life but nothing has ever been this hard.”

Today Dawkins honors his daughter’s memory with photographs and prayer, he said.

“We buried her ashes in her beloved Jamaica, but I kept some and have a memorial on my dresser with a small urn of her there. It’s the first thing I see when I open my eyes each day. It’s the last thing I see before I close them at night.”

Dawkins has three other daughters and a step–daughter, and Crystal had family in California, New York, and Jamaica. She had come here to get to know her southern family.

“She never really got to know her South Carolina family,” he said. “She didn’t have time. They know her in death but not in life.”