Dispatch: Four months after a homicide

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Dovon Harris, 15, was murdered in Watts four months ago, dying on June 17. The Homicide Report has been following his family’s experience in monthly installments since then.

This month would have been Dovon’s 16th birthday.

His family celebrated with cake in a rented hall. Scores of friends and family members attended. Dovon’s siblings and close friends blew out the candles.

‘I was thinking about him all the time,’ his mother, Barbara Pritchett, said. ‘Thinking about what he would be doing if he were there. He’d be messing with everybody.’

Pritchett had been doing OK, she said--back to normal, ostensibly, and on the job as a health-care worker.

But three days after the party, she fell apart.

It was her own birthday. When Dovon was alive, he always found her in the kitchen first thing in the morning, and said, ‘Here’s your day! Here’s your kiss!’

In the morning, she drove her brother to school. Then, ‘I came back and I never made it out of the car,’ she said. ‘I sat in the car for three hours and cried.’

The next day, she went to work, and the same thing happened. ‘I was supposed to take the patient for errands,’ she said. ‘But when I went, I just sat in the car crying. I finally had to go inside and apologize.’

On the next day she went to a medical center to inquire about counseling. She felt ill at ease, she said. ‘But I’m determined not to let this beat me. I know I need counseling.’

Other family members are also registering the effects of grief. Since the murder, some relatives who once felt at ease at Pritchett’s house now seem to feel uncomfortable there. Pritchett, her siblings, and her children, tell each other they are fine even when they’re not. They go off alone to cry.

Dewayne Harris, 26, Dovon’s older brother (second from left), spent one day recently alone at the grave, sobbing.

Dovon’s 18-year-old sister Dwaina (right) attended a meeting for teenagers held by the pastor at her church. They talked about the murder. Many of the teens were angry. Why? they asked.

Afterward Dwaina had one of her dreams about Dovon. She dreamed he was there at the meeting. ‘Every question everyone asked, he had an answer,’ she said. Then she woke up, and the answers weren’t there anymore.

See Three Months After, and, Two Months After, and, One Month After.