I also found this article that came out in May of 2007. It's title is Parents' Memories Of Channon Christian. Because it was early in the investigation and no cases gone to trial, some of the details are a little off but just read. I cried like a baby. Reading that Gary still listens to his daughters voicemail... no words.
Wake up to find your daughter missing.
Spend the next two days in a frantic search to find her.
Learn that she was kidnapped, raped, tortured and strangled, her body discarded in a garbage can. Bury her. Be haunted by ghastly images of what she suffered. Call her cell phone just to hear her voice. Stare at the people suspected of killing her. Don't yell out. Don't grab them. Don't kill them.
"You put yourself for just a minute - don't stay long - in my shoes," Gary Christian said Monday. "I've been a religious person all my life. When this happened, God said he'd never put on you anything you can't take. Well, that's a matter of opinion. That's yet to be seen."
Gary Christian and his wife, Deena Christian, have spent the past four months grappling with the Jan. 7 slaying of their 21-year-old daughter, Channon Christian, and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Christopher Newsom.
The couple was kidnapped by what authorities contend was a band of robbers initially intent only on taking Channon Christian's Toyota 4-Runner from the parking lot of an apartment complex on Washington Pike. The pair had gone there to visit friends, eating Applebee's take-out food and watching a movie.
In Gary and Deena Christian's view, only two people in this world can really know their suffering - Newsom's parents, Hugh and Mary Newsom.
"They really didn't know us from Adam," Gary Christian said of the Newsoms. "We didn't know them. (Now) we have become very, very close very fast."
"They're the only people who know how we feel," Deena Christian added.
Channon Christian and Newsom had only just begun dating when their lives were taken. Authorities believe the couple was kidnapped at gunpoint and taken to a house on Chipman Street, where both were repeatedly raped. Newsom was shot, his body wrapped in a blanket, set afire and dumped alongside nearby railroad tracks. Channon Christian was held captive for at least several hours before she was strangled and her body wrapped in trash bags and discarded in a garbage can inside the house.
Gary Christian said he will never forgot the first moment he saw his daughter nor the last time he heard her voice alive.
"They took her and put her in a little incubator," he recalled of his daughter's birth. "I put my finger down toward her hand. I put my finger in her palm. She closed her hand around my finger, and I was one whupped puppy from that day on."
It was 12:35 a.m. on Jan. 7 when he last heard from her. She told him that she and friends planned to finish watching a movie and then she would be home.
"I said all right and be careful and I love you, and she said she loved me," he said.
Deena Christian would start calling her daughter's cell phone later that morning. It would never be answered.
"I just kept calling and calling and calling," she said.
Gary Christian calls it still.
"I still call her voice mail and listen to her - 'This is Channon. I can't come to the phone right now, but I'll call you right back,'?" he said. "I've listened to it four billion times. I've recorded it."
Authorities were slow to launch a search for Channon Christian when her mother first phoned in a missing persons report. Such reports are fairly common. Most missing adults turn up alive. The discovery of Newsom's body later that day changed all that.
In four days, an army of law enforcers - including local, state and federal agents - rounded up four slaying suspects and a fifth accused accessory. Charged in the double slaying are brothers Lemaricus "Slim" Davidson, 25, and Letalvis "Rome" Cobbins, 24, his girlfriend, Vanessa Coleman, 19, and accused conspirator George "Detroit" Thomas. Eric "E" Boyd is charged federally with trying to help Davidson flee.
"I developed two things that I hope to God I can some day get rid of," Gary Christian said of his reaction to the allegations. "One is horror that you cannot understand, and the other is just a hatred I hope you never know."
Link:
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/may/22/parents-memories-of-channon-christian/
