It was December 24th, 2012. The sun was making its final decent past the hills and the moon was beaming. I just pulled the ham out of the oven while my older sister Delilah set the table. My father Leonardo and my younger sister Christa were finishing up the movie in the living room. I heard a knock on the door and asked Delilah to go get that. We weren’t expecting any guests this late but we live the the country in Texas, neighbors come uninvited all the time.

When Delilah opened the door there was nobody there just a big box. She yelled for us to come look. As I took off my oven mitts my father and Christa were already on the porch. The box read “Merry Christmas to the Felix’s” my dad shouted out. He reached down to pick the box up as I rounded the corner it blew up in an instant. It all happened so fast I flew over ten feet and slammed into the back wall and that was the last thing I remember from that night.

I woke up six days later with a broken femur and two broken ribs. When I woke the doctor ran some tests and told me an officer from the local station would be in shortly to talk to me. I knew right then that it was going to be bad news. I took a deep breath and a tear fell from my cheek. I layed there trying to breathe but my anxiety was going to get the best of me, it always does.

A little over an hour went by and that was when Sheriff Lyle came in. Sheriff Lyle and my dad have been friends since they were little boys and they were both officers in the county we lived in. The fact he was the one here to talk to me I knew it was horrible news I was going to hear. As he approached the bed I could see in his face he had been crying. He removed his hat and started to cry more. I looked at him and asked him if my father and sisters were okay. He told me Christa suffered from a severed artery in her left arm and multiple broken bones, they couldn’t save her arm and had to amputate it at her elbow. He told me she would survive but she was still asleep. Then he bowed his head and told me Delilah suffered from internal bleeding and her injuries were too intense. She had made it to the hospital but they weren’t able to stop the bleeding and she passed five days ago. That’s when I knew right there that my father was gone too. Lyle was being to hesitant about it so I asked him “what about my father.” He saved me the gory details but he told me my father was DOA. Dead on arrival.

Over the next couple weeks they had monitored me and eventually Christa woke up. It was just me and her now and I needed my sister. They moved us into one room and we preferred it that way so we could be there for each other. Over those few weeks Lyle would come to help us plan the funerals. We had decided to do just one for the both of them because they wouldn’t want our family and friends have to go through that pain twice rather than it happening at once and give time to grieve. We spent a little under two months in the hospital before they let us leave. The town had come together and rebuilt the front of our house and it looked brand new when we got home. I was nineteen years old, Christa was only fifteen and now I was her legal guardian and both our parents were dead.

Five Years Later

I woke up early to get ready, today was a super important day. It was the summer of 2017 and I was taking my detective exam. After the incident in our home I took time to heal. I spent over a year in physical therapy with Christa and once I was cleared I went straight to the police academy. I graduated in the summer of 2014 and have been working in our local police department ever since. Christa finished high school online due to her injuries but decided she wanted to go to college. Her school is only forty five minutes from me so she is still living at home.

I decided to join the force after the incident because I didn’t want to drown in my trauma and I wanted to put it to good use. The police never figured out who did this to my family or why it happened at all. I thought to myself for a while what difference could I make if there is no evidence. That was when I realized I might never get answers about what happened or why but, maybe I could help prevent that from happening to anyone else.

There had been no other bombings anywhere near us since then so we did figure it was a target just for us. If it were a serial bomber they would have struck again. Lyle spent most days and long nights trying to bring my father and sisters murder to justice but there soon became no hope. With no evidence things like this are nearly impossible to solve. That is why I am now devoting my life to protecting others.

I finished getting ready and made sure Christa was awake and ready. We grabbed our bags and she dropped me at the station before heading to her first class of the morning. She was taking her last final today so really it’s an important day for both of us. As I walked into the station Lyle was standing there waiting for me with a cup of coffee. Every milestone I have made since entering the academy Lyle has been there. He was there for my graduation, he was there when I got stationed, and he even hand picked my training officer. He always told my father he would look out for us and he has always kept that promise.

Lyle walked me to the office that we used for meetings and made sure I had everything I needed for the exam. It was a hundred question test followed by thirty minutes of an oral test performed by the Sargent which was now Lyle. I had one hour to complete the test but I finished in forty five minutes. I had been studying for this for months. I want to be a detective so bad because then I will be first hand at solving crimes and I could get more access to the information about my father and sister. I was more than determined to get this and I would do anything to pass.

After my oral exam Lyle walked me out and told me results would be posted in a week or two. I wasn’t the only officer taking the test but I knew if I passed I would be the one taking the job in our station. Being a detective was a big responsibility and I was very ready for that. I wanted it, I almost needed it. With everything that has happened in my life this felt like I was taking something back.

So when I got that call a week later that I passed I was extatic.

Now that I had the job I could access things I never could before. The first file I pulled was the file about our incident. There was something odd about this file white I read it. It was redacted like information had been hidden. I never got told that and now I was furious. What was being hidden and why couldn’t I see the details. I was supposed to have full access to everything now so who was hiding information about this within the police station. Now I wondered if this was an inside job and who could have pulled this off.

I immediately went to Lyle about it and he had nothing to say. He said there was no evidence so they couldn’t prove anything and I should just drop it. I was never going to drop this my father and my sister are dead and I was going to find out who did this to us. I didn’t like how Lyle brushed this off and it almost made me wonder if he had something to do with it. That is when I started investigating on my own, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone.

I snuck into Lyles office searching high and low. I even opened his computer and went through all of his files. I found the reports in his computer which didn’t match the printed ones I read from the evidence room. Something about all of this wasn’t adding up and I was going to get to the bottom of it. I emailed everything to myself and went home. I studied the files for hours finding clues to what was real and what wasn’t that’s when I came across Christa’s name, TWICE. She was the original suspect why did I not know this. They found weird things in her search history and text messages to a random number that had to do with “ending her suffering” what suffering was she enduring? I spent all night trying to figure out what all of this meant. In the morning I was going to ask her.

Christa flipped the fuck out when I asked her about all of this. She claimed all of that was fake and she has no idea what any of it was. She proceeded to say “if this was me why would I have blown my own arm off?” I believed her, she was the most honest person in our whole family and I knew all of this “evidence” seemed planted. I got all of my research put together and I went into the office. I set it on Lyles desk and told him to fess up. He told me he redacted the files because he knew the evidence against Christa was fake but he knew if anyone else saw it they would pin everything on her. I believed him too because Lyle never lied to me.

I felt like I was back at square one no new evidence, no leads, absolutely nothing until Lyle called. He called me to say I needed to come in immediately. They found the person who did this to my family. He said I needed to see this for myself. I woke Christa up from her nap and told her we needed to go to the station right now. When we got there Lyle was waiting in the hallway to take us to the interigation room. He said the person came in very early this morning and gave a full confession in detail even with the lies about Christa. As we turned the corner he told me to breath because I knew the person. Christa and I walked through the door where the two way glass was and the detective inside stood up, sitting across from his was our mother, she had been “dead” for ten years…