In noting the ages of her six children, Xai Hang says Pa Houa is 14. Her fourth-born child was found shot to death and abandoned in a broken-down van a year ago today, when she was 13.
But if anything, Pa Houa Yang is more alive now than ever as her murder remains unsolved, haunting her parents' thoughts daily and smiting the family's joy.
"It's been a long year because we are still waiting," said her father, Dang Yang, a heavy solemnity in his voice and an agitated bounce in his knee. "It's been too long."
It was a Friday afternoon last year. January 14. A Minneapolis man went to retrieve a jacket from his van, parked in an alley behind his home on Russell Avenue N. in the Willard-Hay neighborhood. There in the front seat was Pa Houa's frozen body.
Pa Houa, who lived about a mile away, had been dead for about a day, police said, the victim of a gunshot wound to the head.
Reported missing
When she didn't come home from school Jan. 12, her mom went to her bedroom, bent low, pulled out her bottom dresser drawer and searched for a pink tin box where Pa Houa kept her money. The bills her daughter had slowly collected over time were gone.
She had taken the $70 with her. Her mom doesn't know why. She refuses to believe that her daughter's life was taken for a bundle of bills, but in the next breath she wonders, "Maybe they wanted it?"