Nine-year-old Audrey was all eager to be on TV. She likes to dance like her mother.
But behind the third grader’s exuberance was a child grieving for her mother. Audrey spoke in a quiet voice as she held her mom’s dog, Toby, tightly.
“Every time I look in his eyes, I see mama’s eyes,” she said, her voice barely rising above a whisper.
Their mother, Jacqueline “Jackie” Hughes, was found murdered in a house in Oak Cliff.
“I miss her,” Audrey said. “I’d rather give her my whole heart cause I miss her that much.”
She is named after the grandmother who will now raise her.
“It hurts because I couldn’t save my daughter,” said their grandmother, Audrey Hughes. “I couldn’t save my grandkids' mother.”
Jackie’s boyfriend, Brandon Sampson, was captured over the weekend in San Bernardino County. He is charged with murder. He will be extradited back to Texas.
A missing Fort Worth woman was found with him. She was unharmed.
Jackie’s family cannot understand why anybody would want to hurt her. “Everybody just loved her,” her mother said.
Jackie had some tough times. She’d gone to prison on an assault charge when her oldest daughter, Andrea, was five. Hughes raised Andrea until Jackie got out a few years later.
Not long before she died, Jackie lost her job. She began dating Sampson and soon moved her and her children in with him.
Sampson wasn’t mean to them, Andrea said, but he didn’t talk to her or her sister. She never saw him be violent to her mother.
Hughes only met him once before Jackie disappeared.
A few days before Christmas, she dropped the girls off at their grandmother’s house a few days before Christmas. It was the last time her family saw her alive.
“She said she loved us and goodbye, and that was it,” said Andrea, 14.
On Christmas Day, Hughes got a text from her daughter, telling her to tell the girls “Merry Christmas.” Hughes thought it was odd that Jackie didn’t call. The text didn’t sound like Jackie, either.
“We always end with, ‘I love you,’ she said.
She repeatedly called daughter’s phone. No one ever answered it. Days would go with no word from Jackie.
On New Year’s Day, they went to Sampson’s yellow frame house on Castle Hills Drive. Hughes was convinced she was there because the dog was there. “She don’t go nowhere without the dog,” Hughes said.
Sampson told them she’d gone to Miami.
“I said ‘Nah, that don’t sound like my daughter,’” said Hughes. “She’s not going to get on a plane.”
He also said he had thrown out all of the girls' clothes because Jackie had not taken them.
Not believing his story, Hughes went to the city’s south central patrol station and filed a missing person’s report that day. She was not happy with the police response.
“They told me at one time that she’s an adult, and she just may be trying to be by herself this Christmas holiday, and I told them this is not like her,” Hughes said. “To me, it was just like they were unconcerned.”
The family took to social media and began posting fliers, seeking information about Jackie’s whereabouts.
Three days after her report, officers went to the house and did a “health and welfare check,” but the house appeared vacant, and no one answered. Hours later, someone was shot inside the house. Officers searched the house but did not find Hughes.
On January 8, an anonymous person sent Hughes screenshots from Sampson’s Facebook account under the name “Yezsir SpecialKingsz.”
The message said, “Haha, ya’ll think I really took that hoe to the airport....” The message mentioned dumping her behind a lake.
“She gone,” it read. “Stop looking and I am to. Lol.”
Hughes contacted the police, promoting her case to be upgraded to “critical missing.”
Investigators then checked the history of where her phone was last located. It was last shown to be located in Farmers Branch near a lake and near Sampson’s house. Police searched the lake area but did not find Hughes.
On January 9, detectives got a search warrant for Sampson’s house. Her body was found in his garage. Sampson was not there. He was long gone.
“She didn’t deserve that,” said Hughes, who runs a home daycare. “Nobody deserved what he did to her. She was really brutalized, and the police dropped the ball.”
It will now be her job to raise her two granddaughters.
The two sisters have an easy camaraderie. As they stood in their grandmother’s living room, they munched on French fries and chicken.
Andrea is more like a mom to her younger sister. “Because mama's not here to help us, I have to help her,” she said.
She’s doing her best to keep things normal. Andrea didn’t want to cry in front of her younger sister. “I try to keep myself together,” she said. “I don’t want to cry in front of her because she starts crying and then we’ll both be a wreck.”
Last month, friends and family gathered on a chilly night to pray for Sampson’s arrest.
“He’s not even a man,” said one woman. “He’s not fit to walk this earth.”
At the vigil, they remembered Jackie – a sister, a daughter and most of all, a mother.
Andrea stood holding a red heart-shaped balloon.
“Good bye, mama,” she said, kissing the balloon and letting it fly into the air.