TEXARKANA MAGAZINE
October 9, 2020
O ctober 9, 2020, began like any other Friday in New Boston—a quiet, ordinary, forgettable morning in a small town where routines are reliable and the unexpected rarely interrupts. Jessica woke up, got ready, and drove to work shortly before 8:30 a.m. As she drove, she contemplated stopping by to see Kynlee before heading to work. She decided against it, telling herself that Reagan would be getting ready for work and getting Kynlee ready for daycare, and she did not want to disrupt their morning routine. Just before 10:00 a.m., Jessica was in her office, chatting with fellow employees, when her phone rang. It was Homer checking to see if Jessica had heard from Reagan that morning. Homer explained Reagan did not show up for work, and he was texting her, but the responses did not sound like Reagan. Additionally, his neighbor let him know his dog had gotten out, but she had put the dog back in the yard. Homer also wasn’t sure if Kynlee had been dropped off at daycare. Upon hearing this, Jessica left work immediately to go check on her daughter. She made a quick phone call to her husband, Marcus, to let him know something was odd and that she was heading to Reagan and Homer’s house. Kynlee’s daycare was on the way, and a quick stop there revealed that Reagan had not dropped Kynlee off for the day. It was at this moment that Jessica felt the first real sense that something was off and even considered going straight to the police station across the street from the daycare center. However, after discussing it with Marcus, she decided to stick to her original plan and go to Reagan’s house. This decision and the events that soon followed would become etched in Jessica’s memory for the rest of her life. “As I turned onto their street,” Jessica said, “I could see the garage was open, and Reagan never left that garage open. So that kind of worried me.” As she approached the house, Reagan’s car was there. Jessica pulled into the driveway behind Reagan’s car, got out, and started walking up to the garage. She noticed red streaks, which she instantly identified as blood. However, still completely unaware of the horror that had taken place inside her daughter’s house, she rationalized that the dog had hurt its foot while it was out and was bleeding. “It felt like it took forever to get to the door,” she said. When she finally reached for the doorknob, her eyes caught a bloody fingerprint. From where she stood, still living in the before, her thoughts moved with a strange calmness. “So I backed up,” she said. “I don’t need to touch anything. I don’t know what this is. So, I sat there a second, and then I took my work shirt and reached and turned the doorknob, and I pushed the door open.” She called out
for her daughter. “Reagan? Hey, babe… Reagan, answer me.” There was no answer. Jessica looked down and saw a bloody footprint on the floor. That image pushed fear squarely into her chest. She stepped back and closed the door—but only for a moment. She told herself, “If she’s in there and she needs me, I need to find out where she is.” Jessica pushed the door open and saw every mother’s worst fear. “She was facing away from me, and her hair was red from all the blood.” She then called out, “Reagan, Reagan, baby, answer me.” With no answer from her child, Jessica backed up, pulled the door shut, and just stood there. “I just thought, what do you do? What am I supposed to do?” There it was, the blast reverberating in her ears, muffled sounds, time slowed, and it didn’t seem real. Reality set in, and the neighbors heard her screams as she called 911 in a deep and frantic plea for help, screaming through her pain at what she had just seen. She was in the driveway on her knees when her husband, Marcus, and their friend, Chris, arrived. Jessica began to plead with Marcus, “Don’t go in there. Don’t look. Chris, please don’t let him look.” Five years later, Jessica said the thing that haunts her as much as seeing Reagan lying on that floor is seeing Marcus’s face after he saw Reagan’s lifeless body. It is hard to grasp the horror they were engulfed in at that moment. Marcus questioned Jessica about the whereabouts of their granddaughter, Kynlee. As Marcus yelled her name through the door, they finally heard a faint cry from the toddler. Chris made the heroic decision to enter the house to find Kynlee and bring her to safety with her family. “Chris tried the front door first, ‘cause otherwise he would have had to step over Reagan.” The front door was locked, so there was no way around it. Chris found three-year-old Kynlee hiding under a blanket. He picked her up, wrapped her in a blanket to shield her little eyes from the horror, and brought her to Jessica and Marcus. As they checked her, they found blood, but no external wounds. Kynlee kept repeating, “Where’s my mommy? Where’s my mommy?” As Homer arrived, the family did everything they could to hold him back and protect him from the gruesome scene just inside his house. Knowing there was nothing he could do for Reagan at that point, he just wanted to find and hold Kynlee and make sure she was okay. By late morning, officers and investigators swarmed the scene, carefully gathering evidence that would be used to bring Reagan’s killer to justice. In the midst of the worst moment of her life, Jessica commended the work of law enforcement. As the investigation
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LIFE & STYLE
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