Parenting Is So Very Hard, In Honor Of Chaundra (Word Published)

I didn't know Chaundra Davis. But her disappearance written by hand and made into a flier caught my breath. It could so easily have been my daughter. 

________________________________

This is my original published writing about Chaundra Davis, from the year 2008.

________________________________

“When they called me and said they wanted to talk to me, I knew in my heart that it wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” said James Davis, 24 hours after learning of his daughter’s death. Chaundra had been missing for fifteen days, since November 7. The neighborhood had actively passed out photos, fliers asking for any information about this woman. She was only 5'4" and a mother of three children.

I had seen the flier posted at the Downtown Pharmacy on Saturday, November 21. She was an attractive young woman, and the photos reflected someone who was loved. It was the very next day while walking my wonderful, but active Labrador/Great Dane dog named Christopher, that I very sadly found Chaundra.

I was to learn that Chaundra had recently moved into a new apartment with her children and was working in Rockford (outside Chicago) as a caregiver. Her friends and family described Chaundra as a great cook who loved the limelight. When I hear this, that is, that she was a great cook who loved the limelight, I automatically give a big smile and a 'You Go, Girl!'

I love to hear about women who have self confidence and know they have skill and this was Chaundra.

Her father James Davis had been concerned of late because of the people she was hanging out with, but he also knew, she was an adult and couldn't be watched 24/7.

I don't know what happened and how she died. All that I know is that she had gone missing, and I happened to be the person who found her body in the water, that is at the edge of Rock River, near the train bridge. This water edge abuts the parking lot of a long ago abandoned manufacturing plant.

Someone - some someone - probably drove into the well-known empty parking lot and dismissed her young body into the river, right where it dropped off into the dam. But a floating tree caught her and held her, and she clung close to the river's edge, never going anywhere.

Chaundra had three children: two sons, Javar, 19, and Jonathan, 13; and a daughter, Jamecia, 9. She had a family who loved her and who looked for her when she went missing and who ached and will ache for a long time.

As a mother myself of a child who was very well raised and yet at age 25 got involved in meth, but is now over three years clean, I have learned something: we birth children and it is our responsibility to raise them to be good citizens. That is all we have. We don't have the right to choose what they will do, whether it is good or bad, and we don't have any control really except to try to raise them well.

For Chaundra's parents, I send them wishes that they know their acts of discipline and child-rearing were well-done, well-intended and with God's grace, the best parenting that could have ever been given to her.

To Chaundra's children, I send them wishes to know they had a mother who was wonderfully beautiful in body and spirit, who intended for them to grow into good citizens. I sadly share that we don't know why they lost their mother, but I would charge them to become the kind of citizens that make the world a better place, to make their mother proud of them.

________________________________

2020 and after readers:

I was visiting family in the Chicago area. Chaundra had gone missing and she was found and I was strangely involved. I'd spoken to Chaundra's father, a very dignified man, after I found her body and have spoken with the family a few times during these intervening years. Both Chaundra's mother and father are devout Christians. I was a Christian who'd raised my child the best I could and yet, at 25 she found drugs. I could so relate.

From the Rock River Times, Jan. 25, 2018 -- The man accused of killing his 38-year-old girlfriend in 2008 was found guilty after a two-week trial. He was sentenced to 70 years. 

James Edward Williams, 52, was found guilty of first degree murder and concealment of a homicidal death nearly a decade after Chaundra Davis was found November 22, 2008, in Rock River. She was strangled to death. 

From the  Rock River Times, "He treated her like a piece of garbage and threw her into a watery grave," Marilyn Hite Ross, chief of the criminal bureau in the Winnebago County State's Attorney's Office, said during closing arguments.

My response to the State's Attorney's Office, for a fact. It was more than a watery grave. Rock River was nearly frozen cold. After all, it was November, in Chicago.