The Billion Dollar Question: Why Can’t the Military Fix Its Violence Against Women Problem?

Grand Forks, North Dakota has some of the harshest winters in the country. In the summer, mosquitoes swarm so densely that the Air Force base 15 miles west of town conducts operations to kill them. Airman Natasha Aposhian arrived in the spring of 2020 having hoped she’d be deployed somewhere, basically anywhere, else.

The city is known for the hockey team at its university, the blizzards, and the base—residents are accustomed to the way drones occasionally appear overhead. One of the first things Aposhian noticed was its flatness. (A sign used to greet drivers traveling into the area’s endless plains: “Welcome to North Dakota, mountain removal project completed.”) “It’s just like Show Low,” she told her mother, Megan Aposhian, comparing Grand Forks to the tiny Arizona town where she spent some of her childhood. The similarity wouldn’t have been a comfort. In 2018, as a college freshman, Aposhian tweeted, “Show Low, AZ: hands down the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

She’d wanted to land somewhere close to home, somewhere warm. Upon learning she was going to Grand Forks, where wind chill could fall to negative 50, she tried to switch with an airman heading to Las Vegas but their schedules didn’t align. When her father, Brian Murray, mentioned this, his voice tightened, as if he were choking.

Maybe Aposhian, who many knew as Tasha, would have come around to Grand Forks. She was an unusual mix of goofy and preternaturally self-possessed—her mother described her as an “old soul”—who through her 21 years, had almost always achieved her goals. Besides, her dad had drilled into her the importance of making the best of things. Instead, around 4 a.m. on June 1, two weeks into a tumultuous relationship with another airman, Julian Torres, he shot her in the back five times. She was running down the barracks hallway when he opened fire. One bullet pierced her heart, likely killing her before she hit the ground. Torres then shot himself in the head.

The pandemic was raging and George Floyd had just been killed. At first, Aposhian’s murder was subsumed into the howling swell of other news. But in the weeks that followed, female veterans and military members started sharing stories of harassment and assault using the hashtag #IAmVanessaGuillen, a reference to the Army Specialist killed in April after telling her mother she was being sexually harassed.

Aposhian’s story became wrapped into a broader reckoning. As the headline of an August Yahoo News story declared, “After Two Women Were Killed on Different U.S. Bases, the Military Reluctantly Faces Its Own #MeToo Moment.” The details were different. What they shared was that neither woman trusted her chain-of-command enough to report the harassment and threats they experienced before their deaths.

Over more than a decade, Congress has provided the military with $1 billion to address the issues service women disproportionately face. Per a 2018 Department of Defense survey, 63 percent of the estimated 20,500 service members who experienced sexual assault were women, despite making up only 16.5 percent of the military. But while sexual assault in the military is often called an “epidemic,” and the movement to combat military violence against women has focused around it for years, intimate partner violence, by contrast, against both civilians and fellow soldiers, has been more overlooked. During a 2019 subcommittee hearing, California Congresswoman Jackie Speier described it as a “forgotten crisis.”

In 2002, four wives were murdered by their husbands in six weeks at Fort Bragg, an Army base in North Carolina. In 2011, after Kate Ranta reported her husband for physical violence to a commanding officer, she was told it was managed “administratively”; a year and a half later, as their 4-year-old son shouted, “Don’t do it, Daddy,” her estranged husband shot Ranta and her father (both survived). More recently, a Government Accountability Office report found that from fiscal year 2016 through 2019, there were 33,327 incidents that met the Defense Department’s criteria for abuse; about 65 percent of the victims were women. The real number is surely higher, as this only included abuse, reported to military authorities, between spouses or “intimate partners,” defined as current or former spouses, people who share a child, or those who live together.

Reformers have long pushed to change a central aspect of the military justice system: that commanding officers, who are themselves sometimes the perpetrators, are granted vast leeway in punishing people they oversee. The military, however, has insisted commander authority is inviolable. And Congress, which has the power to structure the military, has proven receptive. “The military always avoided real accountability by outwaiting the news cycle,” says Don Christensen, former Air Force chief prosecutor and president of the non-profit Protect Our Defenders. “That’s their policy.”

With the #IAmVanessaGuillen hashtag, though, the story metastasized, each new account birthing hundreds more. “We’re seeing a seismic shift,” California Congresswoman Jackie Speier told ELLE. As of late spring, the Senate had the votes to pass a bill that would take the power to prosecute sexual assault, domestic violence, and other felonies out of the chain of command and place them with independent military prosecutors. Supporters included everyone from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders, but Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, refused to let it come to a vote. In July, though, it was incorporated into the annual defense bill, which will be taken up by the Senate this fall.

If adopted, it would, per the New York Times, usher in the biggest shift to military policy since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But would it have been enough to avert what occurred in Grand Forks? Not even those closest to Aposhian agreed on who to hold responsible. Was it the military’s issue? Was it about gun violence? Domestic violence? Misogyny? The specifics around what occurred led toward ever-larger questions; trying to answer them could be like chasing a cloud of gas.

While Megan was in labor with Aposhian, her daughter’s heart briefly stopped beating—there was a knot in the umbilical cord. Once she was born, healthy, nurses called her a miracle baby. Her parents met working at Alaska Airlines reservation call center, and Megan already had a toddler, Parris. All four lived for a time with Megan’s family. “Megan and Brian didn’t mesh, but they were good parents,” said Marc Antic, a friend of Murray’s. Once they split, Megan, a single mom of two daughters, struggled but made it work. (Aposhian later told her that she believed in Santa because her mother could never have afforded the presents.) Aposhian, for her part, loved princesses, idolized her older sister, and was so obviously intelligent that Megan scrounged together the money to send her, briefly, to private school. She had an angelic voice, too—no one understood where it came from.

When Aposhian was around 10 years old, the women relocated from Scottsdale to the Show Low area, where they lived on a remote ranch with Megan’s boyfriend, with whom Megan had two additional kids. The move was a culture shock for Aposhian. There was little nearby other than an LDS church. Show Low is also less than 1 percent African American and Aposhian, who’s biracial (Megan is white and Murray is Black), was often stared at. The racism could be more explicit, too. In junior high, some boys drew her with things like fried chicken, watermelon, and Kool-Aid. Not long after, she decided to move back to the Phoenix suburbs to live with her mom’s parents, then her dad, and attend Chandler High School, which had 3,000 students, more than a quarter the entire Show Low population. Architectural Digest ranks it the most beautiful public high school in Arizona.

Aposhian got a job at a trampoline park, joined the choir, and made the varsity cheer team as a sophomore. She got straight As, “wouldn’t give dumb guys the time of day,” Murray said, and she and her best friend, Rachel Paczesny, were so close they described each other as soul mates. They were both cheerleaders, they had the same sarcastic humor, and they’d each experienced depression. “You couldn’t pull them apart,” said Megan. But Aposhian still struggled to know where she fit. As she wrote in a college essay, “Around my Black family I was too white, and around my white family I was too Black. To some of my friends I talked white and to others I sounded ghetto… finding my in-between became a constant struggle.”

Murray was deeply proud of his daughter—he talked about it all the time. Sometimes, though, he worried this led her to put too much pressure on herself. (“If she got one answer wrong on a test it was a bad day, very bad,” said Megan.) Her senior year, Murray convinced her to drop cheer. “She was having these mini-meltdowns,” he said. In the free time it opened, they’d have movie nights or get ice cream—they liked bubble gum flavor. Paczesny, a year older, had left for college, and Aposhian also became part of a broader social group, who learned that once you got past her shyness, she was “a firecracker,” as one put it. When they went out, they’d encourage her to show off her voice. “That was our party trick,” said Juan Cardenas. “She was the girl who could sing.”

When Aposhian began considering joining the Air Force, almost everyone she knew discouraged her. She had a partial scholarship to the University of Arizona in Tucson. Plus, “her personality didn’t scream military,” said Cardenas—she had a hard time even getting yelled at. But she’d started working full-time at a Lexus dealership to not accrue more debt, which led her to take all online classes, which meant college didn’t feel like an experience worth accruing debt for in the first place. The Air Force offered solutions to a lot of issues she didn’t otherwise know how to resolve—about money, about her direction, about having a place to belong. And once she enlisted, she excelled. She graduated from basic training with honors. From there, she went to technical school—she studied materials management—where she grew close with Alanna Rodrigues; they made TikToks and ate Domino’s pizza while studying. Aposhian was homesick—Rodrigues was with her once when she called her dad crying—but she still finished second in her class.

Aposhian told Rodrigues being in the Air Force had helped her feel more at ease, as a woman and as a person who was biracial. Her parents and Paczesny, who’d all traveled to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas for her graduation, noticed Aposhian seemed more self-assured, as if she’d discovered, at some bedrock level, she was more capable than she’d known. It even extended to her appearance. “Obviously she was gorgeous, but getting bullied for being Black took a toll,” Paczesny said. “Her skin color and hair, these were things she was always insecure about. I don’t think she really gained her confidence until she joined the military.”

Aposhian was only ever obliquely political. Occasionally, she referenced her views on Twitter—she didn’t support Donald Trump; she believed in abortion rights. As for whether she considered the challenges women can face in the military, none of her friends believed she had. A number of them seemed thrown off even by this line of thought. “Girls have to be cautious of everything, it’s the way we live,” said her childhood friend Jasmine Gallardo. Erynn Williams, another childhood friend, said that hearing about a similar murder-suicide wouldn’t have kept her from enlisting. “There was just a terrible shooting at a grocery store in Colorado,” Williams said. “It doesn’t mean you won’t go grocery shopping.” They didn’t see the circumstances of her death as related to issues women faced in the military, in other words, because they considered them the same ones faced by women in America, by young people, by people. And in many ways, they were right. Military rates of sexual assault are roughly in line with those of similar demographic groups in the general public; some experts suggest the same is true of intimate partner violence. And these issues, in the military, have long reflected broader national trends.

World War I was the first conflict in which women could officially enlist in the regular armed forces and around 13,000 did, serving in positions like switchboard operators, known as Hello Girls. During World War II, around 350,000 women volunteered, serving more broadly. Some test-flew repaired planes and acted as flying targets for artillery gunners, others worked as nurses near the front lines, and 16 were killed by enemy fire. Their presence prompted, in some quarters, “intense hostility,” wrote historian D’Ann Campbell.

Seven decades later, the U.S. military has been almost entirely integrated, with even the combat ban rescinded in 2013. Yet it’s still possible to find everything from “intense hostility” to ambivalence about what women offer, particularly regarding combat. “If you’re asking if I could see a female in the ranks with the pipe swinging meat eaters of a Ranger Battalion, hell no,” said one participant to a 2015 survey. Defense Secretary James Mattis, upon being asked by a male cadet about the role “badass women” might play in combat in 2018, responded, “Clearly, the jury is out.”

Not all concerns are unfounded. One 2015 Marine Corps study found that, in simulated combat, all-male units outperformed gender-integrated ones. One question is whether negative presuppositions impede the success of gender-integrated units. “I think women are seen as a threat,” said Emma Moore, a research associate at the Center for a New American Security. “They’ll say it’s about standards, that they’re worried for their lives. That’s noise.”

What’s undeniable is that women’s presence is essential. When Mark Folse, now a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, served with the Marines in Afghanistan, female Marines accompanied his unit—they had to be there to search Afghan women. “They went through every firefight with us and were a tremendous asset,” he said. “And we can’t meet our recruiting requirements with only a male volunteer force,” Christensen explained. Yet the problems women face are only getting worse. In 2018, a biennial survey about military gender relations found that 1 in 16 women were sexually assaulted, up from 1 in 23 in 2016. (The pandemic delayed the 2020 survey.) Sixty-three percent of those assaults weren’t reported.

Julian Torres grew up in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida and Dallas-Fort Worth, and was raised mostly by his mom. When he was in elementary school, she began dating a woman whose mother, Deborah Delarosa, described Torres as a loving and empathetic kid. (Neither Torres’s mother nor her ex—they’ve since broken up—would be interviewed). But Delarosa ultimately came to see Torres as charming only insofar as it served his interests. “He’d say, ‘Yes ma’am, no sir. Okay, I’ll help you,’” she said. “Then when he needed something, he’d look for you.” In high school, some saw Torres as a caring guy who looked after his little sister and was into his “shoe game—he had so many freaking shoes,” said a female acquaintance. Others described him as obsessive and controlling, and said he threatened murder so frequently people stopped taking it seriously. His family, per various accounts, was also enmeshed in intersecting cycles of trauma. “Some people knew Julian as sweet,” said his ex-girlfriend, Tabitha, who asked to just go by her first name. “Some people knew him as angry. I knew both sides. He had a split personality.”

They met during his senior year, when she was a junior. He was popular—people called him “Juju the Kidd”—and around 6’3”, with a penchant for flashy gestures. On Valentine’s Day, other girls got chocolate and roses; he had Tabitha carrying around a huge bear. He’d confide in her about feeling unloved—that was part of what brought them close—and sometimes, she’d find him waiting in the school hallway to carry her bags. Other times, she’d be in class getting texts from him saying she was “only good for being a ho.” One of their worst fights occurred because Tabitha was dancing at a pep rally. “He was like, ‘You know you got me looking stupid,’” she said. He ended up punching a door behind her hard enough, she said, to break his hand.

“Juju definitely gave the vibe that he liked that type of rough stuff,” said Julian’s friend Dania, who asked to just go by her first name. “But that was looked upon as sexy.” When someone came to talk to the girls in the school about healthy relationships and asked what they wanted, “They were like, ‘We want him to be jealous, so you know he cares,’” she said.

The incident that ended things permanently between Torres and Tabitha occurred in the spring of 2018. They were broken up, but he convinced her to go to his house. In his room, “He grabbed me and started trying to have sex with me,” she said. “It was hurting, so I tried to push him off. Then he grabbed me again, to the point where I’m lying there like I’m dead.” She didn’t tell anyone for years. “To this day, I cry that he died,” she said. “It comes into my dreams. But he did the most harmful things to me.”

Another woman, who asked not to be named, described a similar experience. She’d agreed to braid his hair, but when she got to his house, he brought her to his room and turned off the lights. “I was trying to laugh it off,” she said. “But things eventually happened.” When she got home, she said, her arms were bruised. She didn’t tell anyone for a long time, either. “He’d seemed like such a nice guy,” she said. “It confuses you.”

When Delarosa learned Torres planned to enlist, she told her daughter, “The Air Force doesn’t take people like Juju.” In Winter Garden, Florida, Torres had been arrested in 2015 and charged with two felonies, for burglary and grand larceny. (It’s unclear how this was resolved since as a minor, his records are otherwise sealed; people with certain juvenile records can be recruited into the military but require a waiver.) During the latter part of high school, he often mentioned being on probation, and claimed to Tabitha this was from “degrees of murder,” she said. He told another girl he’d once almost killed someone in a physical fight because he blacked out from rage. But it was hard to know what to believe—they also saw Torres as insecure and knew he sometimes lied. Either way, Delarosa said the two recruiters Torres visited around Euless turned him away (Air Force Recruiting Service says the two Texas recruiters “were not able to make effective contact or contact at all”). Per Delarosa, Torres then got his juvenile record expunged. He enlisted in Oklahoma in June 2019 and received no waiver, suggesting he didn’t disclose his felonies, as required.

The military does screen for people who’ve received mental health treatment, but in practice, this has mostly just meant anyone who’s sought help experiences additional barriers, said Moore. As for misogyny, “I don’t think they have the bandwidth to interview ex-girlfriends, which would actually be the best way,” Moore said. One idea Speier pushes is for recruiters to be able to consider recruits’ social media accounts.

Torres’s final Twitter header photo depicted a woman’s naked torso with a hand grabbing her throat, an X obscuring her face. Once in the Air Force, Torres often posted photos of himself with guns. He was in security forces, which enabled him, unlike most military members, to regularly carry a gun on base (though not to store one in the barracks), but he soon decided he wanted his own handgun. The minimum age to buy one in North Dakota is 21 and he was 20, so he pestered another airman until she agreed to purchase it. After Aposhian’s death, the airman was charged in federal court with the unlawful purchase/transfer of a weapon—a Glock model 22C pistol that cost about $500. Those charges were dismissed in favor of a court-martial, where, in April, she pled guilty and was given a bad conduct discharge and sentenced to 100 days imprisonment. She read a statement through tears. “I never believed [Torres] would hurt himself or anyone else,” she said. “I thought it was a favor to a friend.”

During Geoffrey Corn’s years as a military prosecutor, he found people often assumed his job involved crimes like going AWOL. “But a military base is just a city,” he said. “You try the same crimes as anywhere else.” Bases are also populated disproportionately by young men. “And there’s a reason the military recruits 18- to 23-year-olds,” said Corn, now a professor of national security law at South Texas College of Law. “They’re fearless.” The military term for this is the “well of courage” and “the well of courage is very deep,” he said. He once had a case where an illegal weapon was not only discovered in a barrack, but two servicemen decided to test it out with a bulletproof vest. When the stress level of any organization goes up, Corn continued, you tend to have more violent misconduct. “This is one of the consequences of endless war,” he said. “Then add COVID to that.”

These aren’t the only conditions suggesting criminality would be higher in the military. It is also in the peculiar position of trying to instill two moralities in its 1.3 million members—one for enemies and one for everyone else. And while those who volunteer do so for various reasons—a paycheck, patriotism, health insurance—they have higher rates of what are called Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. As a 2018 Military Psychology paper pointed out, “Such experiences all too often lead to a cycle of violence.”

At the same time, the military also has unique tools to address criminality, including commanders’s outsize ability to influence the culture and the fact that it already expends enormous energy molding new recruits into a unified force that speaks the same acronym-inflected language and abides (more or less) by the same rules. Folse’s drill instructor even advised Marines about dating. “Things like walking closer to the road, saying yes ma’am,” he said. (Did he ever address consent? “No ma’am,” he said.)

The assumption has often been that increased reporting and greater accountability, particularly for sexual assault, will lead prevalence to drop. But many argue that the chain of command isn’t the only impediment to change. “It’s about culture at the end of the day,” said business performance consultant Joseph Grenny, who a decade ago was hired to advise the military on how to shift servicemembers’ attitudes about sexual assault. He recommended commander promotions be tied to surveys probing whether peer intervention is common, and whether assaults and harassment are being appropriately disciplined. However, the military didn’t integrate his more substantive propositions. “Most of what’s been attempted communicates to the public [that] the military is spending money,” he said. “But it’s woefully inadequate in terms of changing norms. Norms are forged through the mouths of the people around you.”

What’s undeniable is when it comes to handling abuse, there has been such a failure of accountability in the military that it’s impossible to know what works. Intimate partner violence is rarely thoroughly investigated, and successful prosecutions are rare. (One change Christensen suggests is enabling military courts to mandate treatment programs.) A 2019 Pentagon report found that of 219 domestic violence investigations, 209 hadn’t complied with Defense Department policy. A 2020 investigation found that 1,904 recent rape allegations resulted in only 91 convictions.

Once Aposhian arrived in Grand Forks in April, she had to quarantine for two weeks. She met Torres not long after and things moved fast. By mid-May, he was saying he loved her. A few days later, they checked into a Holiday Inn for the weekend—Aposhian arrived to find rose petals strewn on the bed and a bathtub filled with bubbles. “It was every girl’s dream” Paczesny said. Rodrigues had asked Aposhian to FaceTime her so she could vet Torres, and after their call, “I was like, ‘Wow, he’s a good catch,” she said. But the next evening, after Torres invited friends to their room and Aposhian and another girl discussed dressing up and going out, Torres became so enraged he punched a cabinet. Aposhian told Rodrigues it was like he’d changed overnight.

Aposhian briefly broke it off. But “it’s not like you can just brush off your feelings,” Rodrigues said. “She cared for him.” Torres shared aspects of his life with Aposhian he didn’t speak about that freely with others. She learned there was a woman pregnant with his baby. Per the Air Force’s report on what occurred, he also told her an undisclosed secret—whatever it was, he considered it important enough to later claim this precluded her leaving the relationship. Plus, they shared friends and, because of pandemic-related scheduling changes, she had little to do. When Paczesny would tell Aposhian to stay away from him, “She’d say, ‘Am I just supposed to stay in my dorm and do nothing?’”

The way the report depicts Torres is hard to make sense of. One person told investigators he was “a good soul that would light up a room.” Someone else said he was “misguided between right and wrong,” explaining he sometimes passed himself off like he’d been in a gang. (“No interviews or reviews corroborated this claim,” the report later notes.) Another airman mentioned Torres prompting a conversation about what method one would use as a serial killer. The airman, uncomfortable, suggested a hammer and tried to change topics. Torres said he would break a person’s kneecaps and force their face into a fryer. Upon being told this was a weird comment, he said, according to the report, it was “not serious and just for fun.”

During Torres’s final days, he spiraled downward. On May 23, the night he had the fight with Aposhian at the Holiday Inn, he Googled “kill someone prayer”; the next day he searched “guy blows brains out shotgun.” Once they started seeing each other again, Aposhian tried to keep things more casual but Torres found this unacceptable. Not long after their hotel stay, Aposhian was talking to a guy at a bonfire when Torres called. He said if he saw her with another man, he would kill them both, then himself. He also told one friend everyone in his life was against him.

On May 30, Aposhian went with him and another person to Fargo; at one point, Torres opened the center console to reveal a small pistol, apparently to show off. This was around when Aposhian told Paczesny and her parents she feared he would kill her. They told her to report it, but “She acted like, ‘Oh I’ll take care of it,’” Megan said. She didn’t know how a report would be received. And Aposhian wasn’t the only person who didn’t report him. After his death, per the Air Force, another woman alleged he sexually assaulted her while in military tech school.

Early on the night of May 31, Aposhian and Rodrigues FaceTimed and drank Trulys, a hard seltzer they loved. “She said she needed her girlfriend,” Rodrigues said. It was a balmy evening, with a mild breeze. Later, Aposhian and Torres drove into Grand Forks to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey then went to his room. Just a few hours beforehand, Torres had tried to buy an AR-15 style gun; upon learning he couldn’t retrieve it until the next morning, he left.

They didn’t drink much. Mostly they argued. “I’m assuming she went over to tell him she wasn’t committed,” Paczesny said. “Because that’s what got them into the fight.” Around 2 a.m., he threw a bottle at Aposhian, which shattered, cutting her. She went outside to her car and called a friend on-base, then went back to his room.

Just before 4 a.m., Aposhian began filming the first of two videos, which span most of the final 22 minutes of her life. You can’t see much, but you hear as she requests, multiple times, that he return her keys, which he’d taken. She stayed calm, even as she asked if he was going to kill her.

Finally, he asked her to pick heads or tails. She didn’t respond; then there’s the sound of a coin hitting a table. When asked what that meant, he said, “You don’t wanna know.” “But Tasha stood her ground,” said Megan. “She was like, ‘I’m not going to tell you I want to be with you, so you can be nice to me.’” Moments later, as she ran from the room, he shot her.

Almost exactly 23 years before Aposhian landed in Grand Forks, the Red River, swollen with snow melt, rose up past its banks, then the dikes meant to contain it, then the hastily assembled piles of sandbags, in what was known as the flood of the century. News of Aposhian’s murder traveled like the water that day—fast, devastating, inexorable.

Murray was driving to get breakfast at McDonald’s when his mom called to say the news had reported a shooting at the Grand Forks base. When he couldn’t contact Aposhian, he called Megan. She reached out to Aposhian’s friend on-base. This is who told her. Megan called Murray back, crying uncontrollably. Murray dropped to his knees and began screaming. Megan reached Paczesny at the nursery school where she taught—it was her first day back post-quarantine. “Please tell me you’re lying,” Paczesny said. “I am in front of my students.”

Aposhian’s funeral was held June 11, in Chandler, with military honors. At the standing-room only service, there was a gun salute and taps. Against the strict order of these rituals, the event that precipitated them seemed senseless enough to warp space.

In the months that followed, Murray channeled his energy into accountability. How had Torres been able to enlist? How had a gun gotten into the barracks? The problems seemed both broader and more specific than those that would be addressed by the proposals in the annual defense bill, though he believed it was a good start. Meanwhile, at the Grand Forks base, few policies changed.

Murray and Megan agreed something had obviously gone deeply wrong—their daughter had been killed in a place she was supposed to be safe. Megan, however, didn’t necessarily consider the military at fault. “This could happen anywhere,” she said. She made shrines for her daughter throughout her house. She built a memorial in her backyard, with a fountain and an angel statue. She got a tattoo of Natasha’s face, her ashes mixed into the ink. “It hurts so bad,” she texted Aposhian’s friend Gallardo. “This pain is so bad.”

For a while, because of their differences, Megan and Murray stopped communicating. At the funeral, though, one of the things Murray spoke about was how, when he and Megan met, one of the first things he’d noticed about her family was how often they expressed love. “Going to get cigarettes, beer, whatever,” he said. “I love my family too. But to say that every time we’re going to get toilet paper?” People laughed and he paused. “Okay but let me tell you, after a while, it became commonplace for me to say that too.”

Years earlier, Megan recorded Aposhian reading her college essay over the phone—the one in which she discussed being biracial—and the conversation ended just this way, with this echo of love. Parris, in the background with her son, says to tell Aposhian they love her. “Aww, I love them too,” Aposhian says. “Okay I love you Tasha good night,” her mom says. “Love you,” she replies.

“The last FaceTime I had with my daughter, the last thing she said to me was ‘I love you, Dad,’” Murray said at the funeral. “I said, ‘I love you, kiddo.’ That fills me with happiness.”

This article appears in the November 2021 issue of ELLE.