All language subtitles for Murder.USA.2026.S01E22.Taken.In.Knox.County.1080p.FAND.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-MediaHoarderz_track3_[eng]

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Original subtitles

[operator] Sheriff Barber's office.

[caller] I called in last night

about Tina Herrmann being missing.

I am out at her house now.

There is blood everywhere.

We had four people that seemingly disappeared

off the face of the earth.

If they weren't already dead,

it's clear that they could die very shortly

if we didn't recover them.

And that's when the frenzy really began.

It just doesn't happen, especially here in Ohio.

But now it's happening in our neighbourhood.

What kind of monster is this?

[chilling music]

[Jason] Knox County, Ohio is the type of place where you grow up,

you know everybody.

This is a small-knit community.

So if and when something happens,

@ usually everybody knowsú about it within 24 hours.

I can recall driving down this route

and just thinking in my head,

what are we going to find out today?

That you can have a situation like what

happened to Sarah Maynard happen

and it not change you

or the town or the community that you live in.

Just because it was--

it was so horrific--

That it has to change you if you're human.

[Teresa] It is a tight community.

@We knew when something was goingúon or something wasn't right.

A lot of people would leave their doors unlocked,

not think about it, be out walking at night.

I worked at Dairy Queen, and that's where I first met Tina.

We laugh, we joke, we have a good time.

Tina's daughter, Sarah, and her son, Kody,

and my daughter, Keisha, and my son, Audie

got to meet each other because our store owner, Mike,

would let us bring them in.

Tina, she was such a bubbly person.

She was a outgoing and a very compassionate person.

She can tell when you have something wrong or going on,

and she'd always be there to let you talk to her, vent to her.

I am at work on Wednesday, and Tina was supposed to come in,

and she never showed up.

And our manager, Val, went out to Tina's house

to see if she could figure out what was going on.

[phone ringing]

[operator] Sheriff Barber's office.

[Valerie] Hi, my name is Valerie Haythorn.

And I work out of Dairy Queen.

I'm the general manager out there.

One of my employees did not show up for work

this afternoon at 4 o'clock,

which is totally uncharacteristic of her.

- She's one of my managers. [operator] What's her name?

[Valerie] Her name is Tina Herrmann.

H-E-R-R-M-A-N-N.

[operator] OK, I will have a deputy swing out there

and check on her.

[narrator] That night, a policedeputy finds nothing suspicious

at Tina's house.

@ But the next day, Teresa is even more concerned

about her friend.

At Dairy Queen, we have a friend of Stephanie's come in,

and he was looking for Tina.

Stephanie and Tina were best friends

and they have kids around the same age.

We told him Tina's not here.

He said Tina and Stephanie had been together

and that he hadn't been able to get a hold of Stephanie.

So we knew right then something was not right.

Val went to Tina's house again.

She found a window that she was able to get open,

looked in the house.

She seen blood everywhere.

[Valerie] Hi, this is Valerie Haythorn.

I've been dealing with the deputies

to reference Tina Herrmann.

I'm at her house. It is covered in blood.

They decide that we need to shut down Dairy Queen

and have a staff meeting.

Val just kind of broke down,

and that's when they tell us that

something had happened at Tina's house

and it doesn't look good.

It was clear that some very serious violence

@had occurred inside the home.

[narrator] Investigators quickly learn that Tina

is likely not the only victim.

We heard about the children,

should have been home Wednesday afternoon,

and they were missing, too.

We checked with the school on Thursday,

and they had not shown up for school.

And then when the crime scene investigators

went into the garage of Tina's house,

they found Stephanie Sprang's vehicle.

We made contact with her family, and they said,

yeah, she didn't come home.

We haven't been able to get in touch with her.

Clearly something bad had happened,

and we needed to expedite

our search for them as soon as possible.

If they weren't already dead, with the amount of blood

and everything that we saw,

it's clear that they could die very shortly

if we didn't recover them.

Number one, we wanted to process the scene

and see if there was any evidence that would give us

any indication of what might have occurred

or who may have been involved.

We also wanted to get word out to the media

that we had a situation where we're missing a family.

@ [reporter] We are following breaking news tonight

@ in Northern Knox County.

Deputies just got a search warrant

to go into a house there to search for clues

of a missing family.

[Jason] I remember we started learning much more

about the case.

There were, in fact, four people missing.

Excuse me, four people?

In a remote part of Ohio?

That just doesn't happen every single day.

In any one of these cases, you know,

you're always trying to think of the motive, right?

Do police have a motive?

And so as I'm driving,

you know, I'm writing down all of my questions,

and I'm thinking about, what am I gonna ask the sheriff?

What am I going to ask?

You know, is there maybe that one

little bit of piece of information

that may be able to not only help us

get closer to answering what happened.

It feels a little surreal to be here.

This is where the investigation started,

the Knox County Sheriff's Office.

This was the heartbeat of a community.

I just remember thinking,

not only is this community going this trauma,

but also the law enforcement.

They were trying to figure out what happened as well.

There's only a couple of other reporters here,

and we walk in, and there was only one person at the desk.

There's usually several people.

And that's when I knew something else was going on here.

Everybody was sent out.

Because this case involved so many people,

it was all hands on deck.

@Word is spreading very quickly

@that there is a lot of blood at Tina Herrmann's home.

There is a large police presence there.

But no one really knows exactly the background

of what happened.

Everyone's just kind of a mess.

We're all crying, trying to figure out.

We're all confused.

We leave Dairy Queen.

I'm listening on the way home to a local radio station,

and they're already talking about there's a family missing.

And if anyone has any information,

they're not sure at that point

who all is missing

or who all had been hurt,

but that someone had definitely been hurt,

and it doesn't look good.

My kids know Kody and Sarah, too,

and they kept asking, Mom, what's wrong?

Mom, what's wrong?

I just broke down crying.

I sat down between them, and I need to tell them something.

It's not going to be easy,

and that I don't have a whole lot of information right now.

And I tell them that

Tina and the kids are missing.

[Jason] The day ends with a lot of questions.

Is this really happening?

Are they alive?

Was there an active serial killer on the loose?

There was a lot of confusion all across Knox County

because this doesn't happen.

@ I wake up Friday morning,

it is very crazy,

media's everywhere.

People were showing up from everywhere

wanting to know what they can do,

and they put together search parties,

@ and they send differentú teams looking for them.

We go to cornfields, the bike paths, the parks.

We didn't really know where to go.

We just go find places.

The national media has been alerted

@ that four people are missingúfrom this remote part of Ohio.

It was so big, everyone was out trying to find a way to help.

[Harry] We knew Tina and Stephanie

had been out and about on Wednesday

in the late morning.

@We had received no information, no suspicious people

@or vehicle reports in the area.

It was truly a mystery at that point.

One of the things that we wanted to ask the community

was for everybody to check their property,

any of their outbuildings,

just anything at all that was out of the ordinary

to give us a call.

We were asking the public for assistance,

and they were fantastic.

[Bob] Harry just contacted us and said,

we're going to need some help.

@ We asked for the records for the adult victims

that had cell phones, Tina and Stephanie.

We also asked for their boyfriends' cell phone records.

But we simply were not finding anything in the phone records

that would lead us to a suspect.

There's no indication that there is any kind of

narcotics activity taking place at the house.

Those are the things that you might think

would cause a motive.

Nothing like that existed.

There really was not a lot for them to do

other than go through that crime scene meticulously

and see what it told us.

And ultimately, that is where the first big break

in the case came.

The crime scene investigators,

once they finished inside the house,

they went into the garage

and started processing the vehicle that was in there,

Stephanie's Jeep,

and they found a bag from Walmart.

They looked inside and they found a receipt

where somebody had gone on Thursday

and made a purchase of some heavy-duty garbage bags

and a couple of tarps.

And so the investigators went to the Walmart,

worked with the security there,

and they were able to pull up video

of the individual that was in there shortly after midnight.

And they saw this person walking in the Walmart store,

going directly to the tarps and the garbage bags,

and going up to the cash register and buying those.

They were able to watch the individual leave the store,

and he went into the parking lot

and got into a Toyota Yaris,

which is a fairly unusual vehicle.

So let's pull up all the known Toyota Yarises in this area

and see if we can identify any potential suspects.

And so the investigators were going through

who had Toyota Yarises.

And as they were checking the registration

of each of those vehicles, who it was registered to,

one of the Yarises

belonged to an individual by the name of Matthew Hoffman.

So when they pulled up his driver's licence photo,

his picture popped up

and he happened to have the same shirt on

in his driver's licence photo

that we saw in the video

of the individual that was walking around in the Walmart.

[Bob] That's when Matthew Hoffman

was identified as a suspect.

They did some quick background information checks,

determined that he had some priors.

He is a convicted felon

for some crimes he had done in Colorado,

spent time out there in prison.

That receipt really broke the case open.

[narrator] As the FBI pieced together information

on prime suspect Matthew Hoffman,

the public continued their desperate search

for Tina, Stephanie, Sarah, and Kody.

It's heartbreaking to see a community

lost and traumatized.

What makes this case so unique is

we're talking about two young children, 10 and 13.

And I just remember thinking,

how scared Kody and Sarah must be right now,

if they're even still alive.

The issue was, we had two known addresses for Matthew.

One was Columbus Avenue in Mount Vernon.

The other one was at a residence not too far

from Tina Herrmann's house,

and that was the address of his mother.

We basically had two houses

that we were concerned about at that point.

Another function

that the Cellular Analysis Survey team does

is we have the ability to track phones in real time.

Went to the office, got our gear,

and we're up in Mount Vernon by 2 o'clock in the morning,

and we immediately started searching for the phone.

It didn't take us long to find it.

[Harry] It appeared that Matthew Hoffman's cell phone

was at the one in Mount Vernon.

But we didn't know for sure.

That just meant his cell phone is there.

That didn't mean Matthew was there.

[Sarah] Matthew's house is right next to mine.

I can see his house out my bedroom window.

@We live on a pretty main road.

It's about a mile from the public square.

My grandma calls and tells me to go wake up my mom

because something's happening

and there's a whole bunch of cops outside.

[Harry] They made entry into Matthew Hoffman's house.

Immediately in front of them,

Matthew Hoffman asleep on a couch.

The thing that struck me about him first

was he was anú average-sized individual.

But you looked at him, and you could tell

he was very, very strong, very powerful man.

So he was taken into custody right away.

The house itself was in a state of disarray.

It was just really bizarre.

First thing that you see is a living room

without any furniture inside,

but there's a enormous pile of leaves.

It's probably four or five feet high

and covers an entire room.

It was really shocking.

We looked at that and wondered right away,

are we going to find four bodies covered up

in this pile of leaves?

I asked one of the deputies that was there, I said,

has anybody checked the pile?

You know, because it was big enough

to hold a number of bodies.

And he goes, yes, we've already checked that.

There's nothing there.

The house itself

was like a scene out of a horror show.

In the kitchen, the deputy walks me over to the refrigerator,

and it has a freezer.

And I look, and there's a couple little squirrels and chipmunks

that are frozen inside.

Frankly, because of the condition of the crime scene,

we really didn't feel like we were going to find anyone alive.

Everyone was just shocked that we had this young girl,

and she was OK.

She was bound and sleeping in a pile of leaves

with some blankets located in the basement of the home.

She was pretty confused.

Obviously, she was scared, but relieved.

The fact that Sarah was in the house

was just an absolutely overwhelming experience.

Clearly, just an awful situation for that young lady to be in.

@Just to give you an idea of howúterrifying it must have been

for that little girl,

@ this is Hoffman's basement,

and it's like a dungeon down here.

You can see this bed of leaves where she slept.

He definitely is a little odd,

but I never thought it would be to that extent.

Me and Sarah shared the same name,

so I wonder how many times

she possibly heard my mom yelling my name

and thinking that she was going to get saved,

but nobody came.

When we got confirmation from the sheriff's office

that Sarah is alive, there was not

one person in this town or in this community

that didn't rejoice.

@The details are starting to comeúout about how Sarah was found.

Why the heck would he put leaves in his basement

and force Sarah to sleep on those leaves?

What kind of monster is this?

[news] Saving Sarah, finding her alive,

it was the only outcome investigators would accept.

Sarah was safe.

What about Tina?

What about Kody?

What about Stephanie?

[news]ú On her way to the hospital,

BCI agents spoke with Sarah.

@ The conversation was recorded.

[news] Sarah said she was tied up with a rope,

gagged, and blindfolded

and left on the kitchen floor for about an hour

before being driven around and eventually taken to his home.

I'm very relieved that she's safe,

but my heart instantly breaks for her, too.

Is she okay?

What she's been through?

Has she been hurt at all?

We were all questioning, like, "Who's Matt Hoffman?

What does he have to do with this?

No one from work had ever heard of him,

knew anything about him.

You wanna take your hat and stuff off? Coat?

Hoffman was being processed.

He was led into an interview room

where two of our main investigators

tried to interview him,

but he just sat there like he was in a trance.

You kind of understand what''s going on here, Matt?

We can explain all this to you if you want to talk to me, okay?

I think you know what we want to talk about.

But we need to find some, find some people .

The question still remains,

where are these other three people,

and how are we going to find them?

[police] Tell us where they're at.

We'll go get 'em.

November 14th will be the day that they come home.

The day that their family come home.

The day that their grandson come home.

The day that their daughter come home, man.

Right, here it is, you got your eyes open.

Remembrance Day.

Sarah wants her family back, no matter what.

Every person in lawú enforcement will tell you,

the longer that this drags on,

@the less likely that the peopleú that they're looking for

are gonna survive.

And so, there's a lot of anxiety going on right now.

@ He would always walk overú the gravel pit with bags

@ and sometimes not bring 'emú back, sometimes he would.

@[news] The former gravel pit, she's talking about,

is now a park,

just a few blocks from Hoffman's home.

I told the FBI agents this morning

@to go check the gravel pit ifúthey're looking for anything

because that's where he always walked.

[Joni] I have never encountered anybody like Matthew Hoffman.

His mom described him from an early age

as somebody who was interested in trees,

loved to climb, kind of a quiet kid.

I think high school was a

particularly difficult time for him,

he didn't quite fit in.

He moves to Colorado,

and he's working as a plumber's assistant.

He realizes that one of his jobs,

the owner of the condominium is going to be out of town.

And so he decides to set up camp there, cooking meals there,

watching cable TV.

He's using the Jacuzzi or the hot tub.

I mean, doing things that he clearly should not be doing.

He has no permission to be in this person's home.

He ends up stealing some things.

And then in his head, he is concerned

about all these fingerprints that he might have left behind.

And so he decides to burn up the condominium.

He's eventually sentenced to eight years

and he ends up serving six years.

He goes to live with his mom.

He gets a job as a tree trimmer,

which certainly would be right up his alley.

He ends up saving up some money and he buys a little house.

His neighbours initially described him as a good guy.

Matthew moves in and it was kind of like,

hey, we're your neighbours, you know,

would you like to come over sometime?

After a couple months of going back and forth

from each other's houses for dinner and stuff like that,

my mom introduced Matthew and his girlfriend to each other.

They are not together for very long,

and she ends up leaving.

As soon as him and his girlfriend broke up,

he snapped.

He got really weird.

A few weeks go by, and my mom and I are on our back porch,

and she has a couple people over,

and we're all just hanging out outside and talking.

And we realize that he is up in the trees,

kind of eavesdropping on what we're talking about.

But we just kind of shrug it off.

Matthew just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Whenever somebody's behaviour starts changing,

and everybody around starts noticing,

particularly, of course, when it's changing for the worse,

that's a red flag.

Something is going on.

His boss finds out

that he's misrepresented his qualifications,

and that he had failed to tell them

that he had a criminal record.

And so they fire him.

He had developed this fascination

with squirrels in his yard.

And all of a sudden, he starts trapping

and killing and eating them.

Now you have somebody who is demonstrating

concerning behaviours,

who is losing all the things in his life

that have provided some kind of structure

and meaning for him.

I believe that Matthew Hoffman made a good faith effort

when he got out of prison to lead a normal law-abiding life.

And I think it wore on him.

And I think over time,

he got tired of pretending to be something he was not.

Because in reality,

he was a deeply disturbed and troubled person.

[neighbour] He really was a weirdo.

@ Like he sat in the trees.

If you look back here in the tree,

@ there's a hammock where heú would sit and watch people.

He's just different.

@ And he always had fires.

@ [news] Between the fires and other odd behavior,

Davis says when Hoffman was outside,

she made sure her kids were inside.

@ He had said to my friend

that he wantedú to punch my kid in the face

and my kid's eight.

So, the guy's disturbed, obviously.

How did we not know that our neighbour's

@ doing such horrific things behind closed doors?

It's heartbreaking for me as a journalist

to look at people,

to see that allú they really want is answers

@ and they're not getting it.

[news] Hoffman claimed that he gave her a book

and that the two watched a movie together.

Sarah says that is not true.

[narrator] Matthew Hoffman has been charged

with the kidnap of Sarah Maynard.

Investigators now hope he can tell them

if Sarah's mom, Tina, brother Kody,

and mom's friend, Stephanie, are still alive

and where to find them.

But he's not talking.

Can you hear me?

I think you know what we want to talk about.

After a couple of hours of him just sitting there,

he made a motion like...

He hits his chest and then he does this like...

He's breaking something.

And one of the investigators said,

"Your heart? Your heart's broken?"

And he kind of nods yes.

And that was all they could get out of it.

It was extremely frustrating.

I have a lot of extreme hope that Tina, Kody, and Stephanie

are alive somewhere too.

We want this nightmare to end.

The hours feel like days.

And the days are feeling like weeks.

What happened, you know, is anybody still alive?

We just weren't able to get him to admit anything

or tell us any of the information at that point.

So I contacted our agent in Columbus, Kristen Cadieux,

and told her about the case, told her, you know,

what we had going on.

And she said she'd be more than happy to come out.

The stakes are very high in this situation

@ to try to find three people.

So we're thinking, how are we going to get him to talk?

How are we going to get him to get past this view

that he thinks he can just sit there and not say anything?

Hi, Matt. Hi, my name is Kris.

I wanted to talk to you for a second if I could.

I'm just gonna close the door.

So I'm walking in the door, and I see him looking down,

not wanting to connect.

He was crying a lot.

And we started thinking a female taking a more soft approach,

being non-judgmental, focusing on him.

You look pretty exhausted.

What do your friends usually call you?

Did they call you Matt?

I've been talking to him for about 30 minutes, one-sided.

And then he, all of a sudden, puts his head up

and starts speaking to me.

I'm kind of on the edge of your seat.

Is he going to tell us?

Is he going to give us the information?

Then he would back off and come back and say, I'm sorry.

I just can't remember. I want to help you.

I just can't remember.

Throughout this entire day, the clock is ticking.

And as I'm sitting there, I'm thinking,

are they still alive?

Can you tell me if they're still alive?

He never really accepts responsibility,

but began to tell stories like, I had a dream and in the dream,

I saw body parts in bags and it was,

it was disgusting and disturbing.

Then the knock comes on the door.

Time was up, and we weren't allowed any more time

to continue to push him for the information.

Investigators suggest to the prosecutor that,

"Look, maybe if we offer to take the death penalty

off the table,

he would be willing to, uh,

give us actually some viable information.

He agreed to make a statement to provide detailed information

about what happened during the whole ordeal.

So in his statement, he indicated that Tuesday night,

before he actually broke into the house,

he had seen the house.

And he thought it would be a good house to burglarize.

And he actually spent the night in the woods

right across the street from the house.

And at some point in the morning,

probably around 10:30,

he noticed that a woman came out.

And then the garage door was partially opened.

Went into the garage.

He kicked the door into the house,

actually into the kitchen.

He'd been in there about an hour.

He hears the pickup truck pull back into the driveway,

and he hears Tina Herrmann come in through the front door.

And he didn't know what to do.

He kind of panicked.

He immediately confronted her with the knife,

made her lie face down on the bed.

All of a sudden, another woman, Stephanie Sprang, shows up,

and she starts yelling at him.

And he panics and stabs Tina Herrmann

a couple of times in the back,

gets up and runs after Stephanie,

stabs her a couple of times.

It's clear both women are dead.

He realizes that the bodies are too big for him to handle,

so he's got to do something with them.

So he carried them both into the bathroom

and started sawing their body parts.

And while he's in there

and finishing up with the two women,

the family dog was barking at him and that.

So he killed the family dog as well.

And all of a sudden, he hears the children come in the door,

Kody and Sarah.

He immediately stabs Kody.

And Sarah had run into-- towards a bedroom.

So he was able to catch up to her,

tie her up, and keep her bound while he completed

processing the bodies.

Then he takes Sarah to his home,

keeps her bound up,

puts her in the crawl space...

and then he goes to the Walmart

where he purchases the garbage bags and the tarp,

transfers the body parts into the bags,

goes to the Kokosing Wildlife area ,

and he hauls the body parts up a 60-foot tree,

drops them down to a hollowed-out area

down the centre, and then he goes back home.

You know, it's just very difficult for us to believe

whether this story was true or not.

[Kristen] Once he was with his defence attorney,

he wrote up a map, and he gave the location.

Interestingly, he had a caveat in there

that he made them promise that he would not cut down the tree

if he told them where the tree was.

They're thinking, is he even telling the truth?

Is this gonna be just a repeat of the last two days

or is he really going to tell us the true location?

@ [narrator] After four days of interrogation,

Matthew Hoffman,

already charged with the kidnap

of 13-year-old Sarah Maynard,

has finally told investigators

that he's murdered Sarah's mom, Tina,

Kody and mom's friend Stephanie,

and has hidden their bodies inside a tree.

With the community still hoping to find the family alive,

investigators race to find out if he's telling the truth.

@So the attorney had a map thatú Matthew had drawn for him

and leads us out toú Kokosing Wildlife preserve .

The sheriff and I are skeptical.

He starts going off into the weeds,

and the sheriff and I are going,

you know, what the heck is going on here?

And we're trying to follow the attorney.

We're bottoming out,

because it's got ditches and things in it.

And all of a sudden, after a quarter of a mile or so,

he stops.

He gets out of his vehicle.

He's looking at the map.

And he comes back to the sheriff's car,

and he goes, I think that's the tree right there.

You've got to be kidding me.

The crime scene guys got a saw, and they cut out,

about six feet off the ground,

a little hole where they could stick a pole

and a mirror attached to the end.

And as they're looking, they go,

I think we see garbage bags down there.

It's a hard thing to say,

but they had to pull all the bags out, open all the bags,

and determine if they actually had

the remains of all the bodies.

I don't even have words to describe.

I was just sick to my stomach.

I couldn't even fathom...

that happening.

The level of violence that he displayed

@ is far beyond anyone thatú I've ever really seen.

That is a person that is broken, and I'm--

I don't believe that that can be fixed.

[Jason] There was outrage with people in this community.

The question everyone has is why?

Why did he do this?

Why us?

This is not what Knox County is about.

This is not what we do here.

One of the thingsú Matthew Hoffman said was,

@even if I didn't take anything,úthere was something thrilling

@ about just being there.

And that really is telling from a psychology point of view,

because it just means that this is a thrill to him.

After killing people, brutally killing them,

stabbing them long after they were dead,

he just talks about kind of wandering around the house,

just kind of pondering what he did.

He's so distant emotionally from this

that he can't even get in touch with the horror

that he's describing or that he's done.

He was a predator.

[Teresa] After the tragedy,

it just had changed all of us at Dairy Queen.

It wasn't like we were the same crew that worked there.

I couldn't keep working.

It just was like reliving everything every day.

It just really...

...impacted everyone that had been there.

@ Matthew Hoffman had decided

that he would only give up the location

if we promisedú to not cut down the tree.

But they soon after did cut down the tree

and I think it was very much a relief for everybody involved.

[news] Hoffman led investigators to the bodies

stuffed inside a hollow tree

only after prosecutors

offered to spare him from the death penalty.

Matthew Hoffman is currently serving a life sentence

with no possibility of parole.

Nobody should ever have to go through that,

but it was closure for them,

so we were pleased with that part,

and we're also pleased that Matthew Hoffman

will never, ever get out of prison again.

Had this case taken a different turn,

had we not found that receipt,

had we not identified Matthew Hoffman,

I think it's very possible that some time would have gone by

and he would have done this again.

Certainly, where Sarah was concerned,

I have to believe that he was eventually

going to kill her as well.

[Kristen] This is a case that you never let go of.

I do feel relief that they did such a good job

that we were able to find their loved ones,

because there's so many cases where that's not the case.

This is one of those stories you can never forget.

This was so horrific.

The hardest part as a journalist is,

you are always seeking understanding,

but, you know, in this case, you'll never understand why.

[Sarah] I think a lot of people were shocked

that that happened in our town.

It impacted the whole community really bad,

and that has forever changed because of this.

It's one of the standout cases

in my 40 years of law enforcement.

Kody would have graduated in 2019,

and my daughter actually teaches at the middle school

at Knox County at the time.

And for the graduation ceremony,

the school placed a chair with Kody's cap and gown

and his diploma on that chair, along with a white rose.

And when my daughter sent me that photograph,

it hit me like a load of bricks.

The families of Tina,ú Stephanie, Kody, and Sarah

are still healing, and so are we.

Our whole county is still healing.

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