Five months after a homicide

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

This month, a very short, belated report on Barbara Pritchett, Dovon’s mother:

Readers may recall that by four months after Dovon’s murder, Barbara Pritchett had gone back to her job as a home-health worker. She had taken the first steps toward seeking counseling for her grief over her son’s death. But her grief remained a daily struggle. She reported having problems functioning at work, and had taken two sick days because of uncontrollable crying.

This month, when HR checked in five months after Dovon’s death, Pritchett said she had been forced to give up working, too emotionally distraught to hold herself together on the job with consistency. She is back at home now during the day, providing child care for other family members. She had finally settled on a counseling service to send a therapist to her home, but was still waiting for the agency to set an appointment. The upcoming holidays were proving difficult to face without her son, and she said she was focused on ‘just trying to get through’ Thanksgiving and Christmas. HR will return to Dovon’s family for a longer report the week before Christmas to mark the six-month point since his murder.

See Four Months After a Homicide, Three Months After, Two Months After and One Month After.