What Happened to My Sister?: Inspired by True Events

By Jeffery Myrick

What Happened to My Sister is about Colie Gilford, a struggling artist/writer, who experience great tragedy when his only sister ends up getting murdered by decapitation. It goes into detail explaining how they were raised, their neighborhood, as well as the type of family that they came from. It streams all of the events that led up to his sisters horrific death. After coming to realize that local law enforcement arent doing all they can to find his sisters murderer, like a vigilante he decided to take matters into his own hands. All hell breaks loose when Killer Mike and Colie Gilford team up and set out to find Colies sisters murderer. After coming up with nothing her case eventually turns cold. Having to come to terms with that he realized had it not been for his religious upbringing, he wouldnt have been able to leave it in Gods hands and accept it. Had it not been for that he is sure that a lot more blood shed would have occurred probably innocent victims. This story really gives a great visual of what can happen when a family member becomes addicted to drugs. We can do all we can to help them, but will they recover or not we never know. This story show how victims family feel and may react to the situation. It also show the cold side of law enforcement and how they actually react to such victims. This novel will stand out because no one could tell this story unless they have experienced it firsthand as he have. The way that his sister was murdered also makes this story unique. Although being a big city like Atlanta, Georgia, we still dont usually see people being murdered in such a gruesome manner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543419344

Jeffery Myrick

Jeffery Myrick was born at Grady Hospital in 1975 as the youngest of five siblings. He was raised in East Atlanta Georgia, and went to Sky Haven Elementary School and later McNair High School. He dropped out of school in 11th grade, but later earned his GED and diplomas in both heating and air conditioning and commercial refrigeration from DeKalb Technical College. He continues to work in commercial refrigeration while he pursues his career as an author. Jeffery Myrick is a single father with four children and continues to live in East Atlanta, Georgia.

Book preview

Introduction

The Epidemic

My name is Colie Gilford. It was in the mid-eighties and I was about ten years old when I noticed what turned out to be a great epidemic. It was when crack cocaine was introduced to black neighborhoods and lower-class society. Before, blacks and lower-class whites weren’t able to get high because all people were doing at that time was what they called freebasing. Freebasing was very expensive.

When crack cocaine hit the scene, it was the thing to do, being that it was much more affordable. It proved to be the most tragic thing that could have happened to blacks and lower-class whites. Really, it was the worst thing that could have happened to all mankind. I saw firsthand how it destroyed so many families. People were engaging in all sorts of crimes to acquire this drug. There was an increase in panhandlers, burglaries, robberies, and regular assaults. This drug caused so many single-parent homes. The drug looked just like a small little pebble off the ground. That was probably where it got the street name crack rock from. I saw people smoke it by putting holes in Coke cans. I saw people use it to lace marijuana. They called it geek joints. Mostly, I saw people smoke it by using pipes or what they called straight shooters. It was said that during usage, they were beaming up to Scotty, whoever that was. Crack had people like monsters, and that’s what they were called: geek-monsters. If you sold this drug back in the mid-eighties, you could put an order in for practically anything you wanted, and nine times out of ten, you would probably get it.

I grew up the youngest in a family of seven with three brothers and one sister. My family was not shielded from this epidemic.

Chapter 1

Family Ties

My family was from Fourth Ward or Boulevard, in a neighborhood called Buttermilk Bottom in Atlanta, Georgia. It was said to be pretty rough. When I was born, we moved to East Atlanta Zone 6. My eldest brother Otis was the only one out of all of us to graduate from high school. My mother said that they just passed him through, and it told on him later on. Regardless of that, he made it.

My second eldest brother Stephen didn’t play or take no shit. He caught his first prison bid when I was about nine years old for armed robbery. That was the first time he went to prison. He did three years then, but it wouldn’t be his last time. It being his first offense, my parents tried to help him by getting him some good representation. They even spent like over a thousand dollars for a lawyer. At that time, that was a lot of money for an attorney. I guess it worked because he only had to do three years. I remember we would often go and visit him in Milledgeville or Jackson, Georgia. That was where the main prison was then. It is still there today; however, now it is used for diagnostics.

When we went there, we would make it a sort of one-day vacation. My father would rent a car, and my mother would pack a lunch, and the whole family would go and see Stephen. I remember how we would have to go through the metal detectors when we first went inside the prison. I also remember how those doors sounded when they opened and locked. That place gave me a very eerie feeling. I often wondered what it looked like on the inmates’ side of the wall. It was at that time, though, that I decided that it wasn’t a place I ever wanted to be in. Every year, my mother would send Stephen what I called a love package. Around the Christmas holidays, she would send him a big box filled with underclothes, tapes along with a player, and all kinds of assorted candies that he had told her he wanted. I figured with all those things, he should be rather comfortable, and it should help him pass his time by a little better.

I was twelve when he got out of prison the first time. By the time I was thirteen, he was back in prison doing a twenty-year bid for raping a white woman in our neighborhood. I think my parents were fed up with Stephen by then. They didn’t try to get him no fancy lawyer this time. It probably wouldn’t have helped him out too much anyway. It was because of that conviction that I really never got a chance to get to know him that well. When Stephen was serving time for this crime, he was sent to some prison on the Georgia–Florida borderline. I never got a chance to go and see him then.

My youngest brother Sean was the cool one. He worked a pretty good job at Creomulsion, the cough syrup company. He got himself a decent woman and had a couple of kids. He often spent time with me. He would let me ride with him sometimes. He would oftentimes wrestle with me, and that was what made me tough. All of my brothers had a couple of cars and decent women in their lives, but they seemed not to be able to keep them.

Then there was my one and only beloved sister Linda. I thought my sister to be the most beautiful and sweetest person in the whole world. She loved all of her brothers. She taught me a lot of things growing up. She taught me how to count and how to read. Because of that, I had a head start on the other kids when I started school. For the most part, I thought that we had a pretty good family.

Fortunately for us, crack hadn’t come in and destroyed our mother and father from being happily married. My father worked two jobs for over twenty years. He worked at Sophie Mae the peanut brittle company in the morning, and in the evenings he worked at WSB Channel 2 news as a custodian. A lot of times, my father would take me with him when he went to the news station to work. I never got a chance to see them shooting the news live, but I did get a chance to see personally where the broadcasts were done. My mother worked at a sandwich shop, but later, she went to school and became a nursing assistant at a local hospital.

Last but not least, it was me, Dooley, who was said to be spoiled; but I was an honor roll student until I got to junior high school. So I may have gotten a few extra things, being the last child, but looking at my grades in school, I believe that I had earned them. I loved music and sports and had a fetish for clothes.

My father, Mr. Edward Gilford—known as the Mayor—was a great provider, with my mother’s help, of course. He even had a side hustle in which he was a bootlegger on Sunday. He sold liquor and beer. My mother didn’t approve of it, but my father paid her no mind.

So here I was, jumping off the porch, trying to feel my way through life. Since my parents were always working and my brothers and my sister were all doing their own thing, I had to figure out a lot of things on my own. My father was doing his job providing; in between that, sometimes, he would take me to an Atlanta Braves baseball game. We had a lot of great times at the ballpark, but other than that, we didn’t do many other father-and-son things together. My mother was the one who would take me fishing, and we did a lot of things that I thought my father should have done with me.

My father had gotten my eldest brother a job working with him at the peanut brittle company. My second eldest brother was doing hard time in prison. My youngest brother was still working at the cough syrup company, so that just left my sister and I. My sister soon landed a job at Canterbury Court. That was an old folks home on the north side of town. My sister worked in the kitchen. Then it was just me, and I was going to school, trying keep up my role as an honor student.

Everything was going just fine in our family until this epidemic struck home. My sister had met this guy name Prince. He was from Bankhead, a known street on the west side of town. He wore some fine threads and drove some very nice old-school cars. The thing about that was I knew he didn’t have a job. He would take my sister to all kinds of nice places. I knew that no one without a job could afford the lifestyle that he was living. It was obvious to me even then that Prince was a drug dealer. He treated my sister real good, and she was head over heels for him. I guess that was the reason that my parents never got into what he did for a