Jan. 14, 2006: 12 months of sorrow, without any answers

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.

It was learned later that the Franklin Middle School eighth-grader, who earned A and B grades, had penned plans in her journal to skip school and spend time with two teenage girls her parents said were of questionable repute. Perhaps she was at a friend's overnight, her parents thought when she didn't come home.
Another day passed, and still no Pa Houa. Her dad reported her missing.

Even today, neither family nor police can account for her whereabouts from Jan. 11 to 14. Questions about what exactly transpired in the days leading to her death plague Pa Houa's mom, a slight woman who spoke sometimes in tear-choked contemplation and sometimes in measured spoonfuls of steely curiosity.

"They purposefully took her and killed her," she said. "When they took her, how did they beat her and how did they yell at her before they killed her?"

She's never coming back

Pa Houa's parents turned her journal and photo albums over to police. Was the killer or killers lurking in one of the photographs that the social yet quiet girl meticulously collected and placed in the albums?

"I think about her every morning, every night," her mom said, a deluge of tears suddenly paralyzing her in midthought.

Her 5-year-old son, Jack, whom Pa Houa dressed every day for school and walked to the bus stop, silently extended his arm and wiped away the tears.

"I miss Pa Houa," Jack and his 10-year-old sister will say occasionally. "I want her to come back and live with us."

"Pa Houa isn't coming," their mom will reply. "She's never coming back to live with us."

Beyond those sporadic exchanges, there is little talk about Pa Houa's death. Minneapolis police are equally tight-lipped. Police would not discuss a possible motive but said that the murder was not random and that there are no suspects. They refused to discuss the missing $70.

Although the passage of time only compounds the aching for Pa Houa's parents, Capt. Rich Stanek said it could be the very key to unraveling the mystery of her death.

"As time goes by, people who had relationships with one another, those relationships go south and those people start to talk," he said. "Sometimes, time is an ally."

In a year of changes - leaving Christmas presents for Pa Houa at a gravesite instead of under a tree, celebrating her birthday with a muffin-sized cake at the cemetery instead of a sheet cake in her home - there is one constant: her bedroom remains as it was the day she left it.

A bedroom unchanged

"We keep it to remember," said her father.

There Pa Houa slept nearly every night for eight years until she didn't come home from school Jan. 12.

Her parents believe that whoever shot their daughter and left her in a broken-down van in the freezing cold wanted something intangible - Pa Houa's compliance in something nefarious. They know that her good character wouldn't normally invite trouble.

It has been a year, and that is all they know. They don't know if the sharp pang of sorrow that struck them last January when police arrived on their doorstep will ever go away. Or how to lift the thick shroud of sadness and fear from their children's lives. Or whether they could ever find the right words to address the killer or killers, if the time should come.

They may just look, trying to decipher reason and motive in the eyes and creases and posture.

"We just want to know and see who killed Pa Houa," her mom said.
"I wouldn't have anything to say to them."