Something horrible happened here on Thanksgiving night. I heard about it when I walked into the newsroom on Friday morning. As the day wore on every snippet of new information was more horrific – leaving the crew of veteran reporters and editors in our newsroom shaking their heads.

In nearly 30 years of journalism – much of it as a beat reporter covering crime – I have covered many horrific crimes. This case is among the worst. Frankly, I don’t want to recount the details.

Of the four people and one unborn child executed that night, one haunts me: 6-year-old Makayla Sitton, shot five times, including her head and heart, as she slept in her bed – just hours before her premier as a ballerina in The Nutcracker. Makayla was the only child of beloved local television photojournalist Jim Sitton and his wife Muriel. Jim was trying to break into his daughter’s bedroom window when he heard the shots. Makayla’s mother, Muriel Sitton, who had served the family Thanksgiving dinner earlier, was also there.

They tried to revive their only daughter. The paramedics tried, too. Makayla died. As of Sunday night, Jim Sitton was still wearing the clothes he wore when he held his dying daughter – his left shirt sleeve speckled with blood.

I am a single mom. I have one child – Kealy – and she is the love of my life, the center of my universe and a gift beyond my wildest dreams. Like all parents I have had those horrible thoughts – what if…? Because I am a reporter and have interviewed and listened to the testimony of many parents who have lost their children, I have seen this anguish up close. It scares the hell out of me.

Three years ago, during my last major depression, I admitted that I had tried to kill myself twice before as a teen and was now thinking again killing myself. The only thing stopping me was my daughter. She was my anchor to life. I believed I had no reason to live without her.

“Anything happens to her, I’m outta here,” I told my nurse practitioner and my therapist. “I mean it.”

Sometimes I wonder if I still mean it. If I could live through – or would even want to live through – the hellish anguish of not only losing your only child, but having her die in your arms in such a violent crime. How or why would you want to go on living?

“I just wanted to let everyone know that she’s in heaven and we know where she is,” Jim Sitton said in his first comments to reporters. ”God packed a lot of sweetness into that little body.”

Then the next day: “She was on loan to me, and now she’s back with her heavenly father, and he took her mercifully, fast, no pain,” Sitton said.

And the next day: “She loved Jesus and he would not abandon her. He brought her home.”

Faith.

Then I remembered – it was when I had no faith that I wanted to die. I had to believe there was a power greater than myself that would get me through my depression. A friend who had suffered her whole life with depression promised me I would get better. If I could not believe that God would make me better, “Just believe that I believe,” she told me.

I had been brought up to believe in a vengeful God with flowing robes and a white beard. But I could not have faith in that God. And so I developed my own faith in my own God. Sure, the antidepressants and therapy helped. But it was faith that got me through and it is faith that will get me through. It is seeing faith in action – as I am witnessing now with Jim and Muriel Sitton – that gives me peace of mind. The stronger my faith, the less there is to fear.

Thank you, Jim, Muriel and Makayla Sitton.

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (November 30, 2009)

    Last reviewed: 30 Nov 2009