Brenda Cassels still wears her daughter’s favorite pink T-shirt. It was a special tradition they shared.
“Sometimes I’d borrow a shirt from her,” Cassels, 49, said. “We always traded clothes, just whatever we felt like wearing that day.”
Now, she wears them to remember her youngest daughter, Christin, to feel close to her.
“Now I guess it’s comfort for me,” she said.
The Cassels family lost 23-year-old Christin on April 21, just four days before her birthday. She was shot while at her boyfriend’s house late at night, Cassels said.
On Saturday, the lone suspect in Christin’s murder, Blake Carrington Jackson, 21, was admitted into the Putnam County Jail. He was first identified as a suspect in the case after he was arrested in New Jersey on May 5 for separate drug-related charges out of Putnam County, according to Alligator archives.
With Jackson now in a Florida jail, Cassels said she hopes her family will finally get closure.
“I hope and pray every day that my baby gets justice,” she said. “Right now they’re still walking the streets doing their thing, and my baby is underground.”
The fact that Jackson is behind bars doesn’t heal all of her wounds, Cassels said. At the end of the day, she knows that nothing will bring Christin back.
Cassels currently lives with her husband, Randy, 51, who she fell in love with when they both attended Hawthorne High School in the late ‘80s. Besides Christin, they are parents to 28-year-old Brittany, 33-year-old Brandi and 35-year-old Joe.
Even with the support she gets from family and friends, Cassels said the pain hasn’t gone away. Sometimes at night when she’s laying in bed, she said she’ll hear what sounds like Christin walking in the kitchen.
“It’s been really hard,” she said, fighting back tears. “I couldn’t always protect her.”
Cassels said Christin was a helper. She said her late daughter, a Gainesville City College Branch Campus alumna, wanted to be a medical assistant — and even watched after her grandmother when she was on her deathbed in 2015.
“She’d do anything for anybody,” she said. “Everybody loved her.”
As of Wednesday, Jackson remains in the Putnam County Jail in lieu of a $500,000 bond. He faces three separate charges for selling cocaine within 1,000 feet of a specified area and two others for selling synthetic narcotics and opium or derivatives within 1,000 feet of a specified area.
Jackson also faces a charge of grand theft auto in Broward County from a March 3 arrest, according to county court records.
Above all, Cassels said she just wants justice for her daughter and for her family.
“We want whoever did this behind bars, whoever it was,” Cassels said. “If my baby’s not gonna walk these streets, neither will they.”
Contact David Hoffman at dhoffman@alligator.org and follow him on Twitter: @hoffdavid123.
