This is an opinion column.

He didn’t know. On the evening we spoke, on that Friday evening, Elijah Blanchard did not know a federal jury that afternoon found Richard Stallworth guilty in the 2019 fatal kidnapping of 3-year-old Kamille “Cupcake” McKinney from a Birmingham public housing community, a tragedy that transfixed and galvanized us all.

He did not know because Blanchard avoids the Internet as much as humanly possible because of the devastating death of a girl in his own life. “You can’t [search] my name,” he tells me, “without her name coming up.”

“Her” is his daughter, Aniah Blanchard, the 19-year-old Southern Union College student who, on Wednesday, October 23, 2019—three years ago today—was abducted in the wee hours of that morning after walking into a convenience store on South College Street in Auburn. It would be a little more than a month, an agonizing, heart-wrenching month, before she was found. Before law officials, searching a wooded area off County Road 2 in Shorter, Alabama, many among the some-60-member task force of investigators from nearly a dozen agencies involved in the search, found her remains. Aniah’s death was quickly ruled a homicide after determining she had been shot.

It was a tragedy that transfixed and galvanized us all.

“Aniah’s Law or Aniah’s Heart,” Blanchard says of those rare forays online, “It’s always something.”

Aniah’s Law is an amendment – Amendment 1 on the Nov. 8 ballot – that would add several felony charges to Section 16 of the Alabama Constitution, which currently affirms the right to bail except for those charged with capital murder. Among the other charges, if approved by voters, that could make a person ineligible for bail are murder (other than capital murder), kidnapping, rape, sodomy, domestic violence, human trafficking, burglary, arson, and robbery, all in the 1st degree, as well as aggravated child abuse, sexual torture, and terrorism.

Aniah’s Heart is a nonprofit “dedicated to the preservation of life through prevention, awareness, and empowering the vulnerable to significantly impact” violence, according to its website.

You don’t likely know much of Elijah Blanchard—even if you judiciously followed the harrowing discoveries. Blame the complexity of the blended family, which isn’t unusual at all anymore, and the cult of celebrity that permeates so many threads.

Elijah is Aniah’s birth father, divorced from Angela, the birth mother. Both remarried—Elijah to Yashiba Blanchard, a Birmingham attorney; Angela to Walt Harris, a mixed martial arts fighter with the high-profile Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). From when Aniah’s disappearance was publicly revealed through the arrest and charging of Ibraheem Yazeed, 29, with capital murder in December 2019, and beyond, much of the attention centered on the Harris’. Angela and Walt were more public with their grief than Yashiba and Elijah. As an officer of the court, Yashiba mindfully avoided statements that might taint the legal process, as she stood with Elijah, a business owner and minister who is by nature reserved.

During the heightened coverage, he most publicly shared the depths of his grief in a Facebook post: “I have never felt pain such as this, I am asking for prayer.”

He also shared: “It’s devastating me. It’s surreal. It does not feel real for a human being to be talked to one minute and vanish the next.”

A disclosure: I am a friend of the Blanchards, which I revealed in a column three years ago while the search for their daughter was still in force. I still vividly recall a text exchange with Yashiba, which began at 5:38 p.m. on October 24, just hours after Aniah was reported missing:

“Hey Roy buddy. It’s Yashiba. Our baby girl is missing can you put it out there please friend!”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes.”

Within an hour, my colleague Carol Robinson reported: “Police are searching for an Auburn-area college student believed to have been missing since late Wednesday night.”

I’ve rarely seen the Blanchards since 2019 (COVID-19 pretty much kept all of us from seeing each other during much of that time) and communicated mostly with Yashiba. Several weeks ago, Elijah began to reach out saying he wanted to connect. We were due to do so a couple of times, though each fell through. Until that Friday when one of the two persons charged with “Cupcake” McKinney’s fatal abduction was found guilty.

“It’s time for me to speak out.,” he said. “[Aniah’s death] still impacts me. That was my only daughter. That was my last born. That was my everything. That was a piece of me that will never be replaced—a piece of me gone forever. [Other] People can’t say that. I can’t say you could feel that way as a stepparent. Love can be there but the missing component, there’re really no words that can describe that feeling. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since 2019. There’s a side of me that has some sense of peace, but I’ll never have a sense of rest.”

Blanchard digested for a few moments the news of Stallworth’s conviction and expressed a sense of painful kinship with the six-year-old’s parents.

“I pray for them because I know, He said. “Your mind will never forget that day [when your child disappeared]. You forget everything that happened prior to that day but you’ll never forget that day. You remember some stuff to happen after that day, but that day will never leave their minds. She was a baby, an innocent baby. She probably didn’t have the opportunity to defend herself. She never had a chance. She was just out doing what she knew—playing. They took advantage of a disadvantaged [child]. Then after they did it, they put her in a landfill as if she was not even human. That’s the most disrespectful thing you could do to somebody. You’ve already tortured her and took her life, then you throw her away like she’s trash.”

Blanchard isn’t likely alone in this: As a victim of violence, the spate of gun violence in the Birmingham region hits him differently. Just as it likely does so many, too many, who are left behind by loved ones felled by homicide in recent months.

“Right now, people are just being so mean and cruel and don’t have no kind of respect for lives,” he said. “Everyone you turn on the TV, somebody’s getting killed, getting shot. People have no regard for human life anymore. This is wrong. I’m just a little upset; I’m mad at the world or anything. Being a parent who lost his daughter to gun violence, I look at this stuff so much differently now. I’m just really praying about the world and how people were doing things.”

Anyone for whom grief has knocked at their door knows it is never welcome and never truly leaves. It can make three years seem like three days, yet interminable. And incurable. “It can just attack you,” Blanchard says. “It attacks you on every side. It attacks you from a health perspective, from a spiritual perspective, and on a personal level. It just attacks you on all sides.”

Aniah crosses his mind every day; some days he fights picking up the phone and dialing her number. “I know in my heart that she’s not there, but … This has gone on for almost three years and I’m still feeling this way, and we still don’t have justice. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the judicial system. But there’s something’s not quite right.”

The gears of our criminal justice system do not turn quickly—when they turn at all. Yazeed is still sitting in a Lee County jail awaiting trial.

“I’m frustrated about it, but I also understand this is a process,” Blanchard told me. “I understand they want to make sure they cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s. They don’t want someone with a history of violence to continue on that same pattern. They’re still interviewing [people] because, to be honest with you: We don’t know how big this is. We don’t know who’s involved. We just know we got one person locked up. That’s it. But I feel in my heart that it was more with more people involved. So, they want to make sure they get everything right. That’s what I respect.

“I have faith in the system, but yeah, being the father, you’re frustrated but as a human being I do understand that things have to take the right course.”

Blanchard once asked Yashiba if he’d have an opportunity to address Yazeed, or whomever else might be charged, at a trial. Whether on the stand or during a sentencing hearing when relatives of victims often are offered the opportunity to share their grief with the perpetrator.

She responded: “Are you up to that?”

“That was a question I never thought about,” Blanchard said. “Are you up to being questioned? What could you say to somebody who took your child? What could you possibly say to somebody who took something that only God can give: life?”

“My rock” is what he calls Yashiba. “I know she gets frustrated because I’ll just be sitting around and all of a sudden, my mood will just change, like the drop of a dime. Just because of thoughts going through my mind: Was [Aniah] okay? Was she scared? How did they try to harm her? My child fought back. We don’t know what would’ve happened if she wouldn’t have fought back. If she would’ve – whatever they tried to do, she fought back.”

He believes the abduction was “strategically planned”—not a spur-of-the-moment happenstance. “Maybe not for my babe, but someone’s child. Whoever’s behind this has been doing this for a long time. They target certain places and certain types of people. They watch them. We don’t know how long she was watched. We don’t know how long that gas station was watched. She just might have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. But somebody’s child probably would have gotten kidnapped that night whether it was mine or somebody else’s.

“Stuff like that just crosses my mind and I can’t control that. That’s what I’m having to work on.”

Blanchard has undergone therapy, though sporadic. “I backed out,” he said. “The last time I talked to my therapist he said I need consistency. I was like: I understand that but if you haven’t walked my trail, it’s hard for you to understand. Everybody knows the five steps of grief, but to actually follow them and follow through, it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Two days are most difficult—June 22 and October 23. Emphasis on most; many are hard.

“Her birthday and the day she went missing,” he says. “Because on both those days I didn’t get a chance to communicate with her. I didn’t hear her voice on the twenty-third, but we communicated [via text] On her birthday, I would call her and sing Happy Birthday. Regardless of how old she was, she knew she was gonna get that phone call. Father’s Day is hard. My birthday (May 7). Christmas, Thanksgiving. Those days we all were together. Life has most definitely changed for me and it’s changed for my family. It’s caused a lot of damage—damage to my family, my marriage, everything changed because of this. It has hurt so many different aspects of my life.”

There are memories that still, after three years, make Blanchard smile.

“We took a vacation in 2018,” he recalled. “It was just me, her and my mother and my two Aunties. We drove out to Texas [for a wedding and birthday/retirement party]. We stayed in the same room; that was the bond we had. We went shopping and we just spent that time together. I think it was designed for that purpose. It was the last time we were able to be on vacation together.”

Blanchard was called to preach in 2009 but stepped away from ministry a few years ago. In September 2019, however, preached at Tuskegee. Since she was attending school in Auburn nearby, Aniah drove to meet him. The memory of that is a conflicting trigger.

“She beat me there,” he is saying with a laugh. “[After the sermon], she told me: ‘Daddy that sermon gave me chill bumps.’ The dress she had on [that day], she got kidnapped in the same dress. She had on for the sermon she heard last.”

He never seeks the eerie footage of his daughter’s last moments of freedom (yet another reason to eschew the Internet). He’s, of course, seen it—examined it, as perhaps only a girl’s father can.

“Just seeing her in that dress, on that camera at that gas station—I just knew, I could just tell something was troubling her, that it just didn’t happen after [she was inside] the gas station. Something was going on before she went into that gas station. She just had a look on her face. That look will never, never leave the back of my mind. he looked very troubled and very disturbed.”

In January 2020, Blanchard was named Senior Pastor of The Original West Marion Church of Christ in Winfield, Alabama, where he grew up. Just a month prior, family, friends, and public officials convened at Faith Chapel Christian Center in Birmingham to celebrate Aniah’s life. It was a rare occasion when the teenager’s parents—all four of them—stood on a stage as one.

At the event, Blanchard spoke: “This has shaken our family to the core. But knowing she is in heaven, it gives me so much strength, so much joy.”

Nearly three years later, the man called to ministry began to reach out.

“I just felt led to call and talk to you about it because I felt like people haven’t really heard the father talk, not really,” he said. “What is he feeling now? What is he going through? People think, ‘Oh, he’s a Minister. he’s probably…’ No, it’s not like that. I can preach about [Aniah]. I preach sermons about losing my child and how God still uses that to try to show me the reason why, but this is the process.

Related: “Our Aniah is in heaven”: Loved ones celebrate life of slain Alabama teen

“In dealing with grief, I’m dealing with the flesh versus the spirit. I still have fleshly thoughts versus my spiritual side that says God doesn’t make mistakes. God works all things out for the good of those who love the Lord. That’s the word. But on the fleshly side, I still don’t understand. I don’t get it; I don’t get it. I won’t get a chance to walk my daughter down the aisle, have grandchildren, or for her to have children. I’ll never get to experience that.

“Being a man of God it’s a challenge. Yet there’s a relief because I know there’s another life outside of this one. There is another side; There is another side.”

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

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Roy S. Johnson is a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of 2021 Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable”, co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Press-Register. Reach him at [email protected], follow him at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj.