A YEAR has gone by without a clue. Birthdays, Christmas, a high-school graduation – celebrations ruined by an empty chair.
It was last June 18, Father’s Day, when beautiful, 16-year-old Chanel Petro-Nixon vanished, in broad daylight, from her Brooklyn neighborhood. She had enjoyed a life that was blessed – and cursed.
Chanel had parents who loved her, a church that welcomed her, and report cards filled with A’s.
Yet she lacked two important traits: She wasn’t white and she wasn’t blond, unlike the many missing and murdered girls who, around the same time, stumbled from bars and into our collective consciousness.
Chanel had black skin. Did it make a difference?
For a long time, her parents were loath to complain that race played a role in her case’s treatment. Not anymore.
Last week, I sat in their Bedford-Stuyvesant living room, filled with photographs of their “perfect” daughter. Chanel’s mother, Lucita, pulled from a drawer a police report dated June 19 – the day after Chanel went missing.
It unambiguously declared Chanel a “runaway.”
Lucita tossed me a weary look. “I know my daughter. She did not run away.”
Chanel disappeared at 6 p.m., on her way to a restaurant to apply for a summer job.
No one wanted to believe that a black girl from Bed-Stuy could be snatched from a busy street. A local TV station refused the family’s request to air her picture. A rap station declined to issue a “shout-out” to anyone who may have seen her.
Instead of wall-to-wall news coverage, it was up to Chanel’s father, Garvin, to canvass the neighborhood with her photo.
Nothing.
Chanel was next seen June 22, 2006, her lifeless body on a curb near her apartment, stuffed into garbage bags and left out with the trash.
She was strangled but not raped. She wore two gold bracelets, and was fully dressed, but her cellphone and sneakers were inexplicably taken.
Cops then devoted untold man-hours interviewing all of Chanel’s friends. They fielded hundreds of tips. Eventually, $38,000 was offered as a reward for useful information.
Nothing.
What is the cost of a murdered child? Today, Chanel’s father has turned against the neighborhood he once embraced. When he comes home from his job at Delta Air Lines, he avoids his neighbors.
“I don’t trust anybody,” he said. “That person shaking your hand, smiling in your face, could be the one who did this.”
Her mother has reacted differently. “I won’t let anger poison me,” said Lucita, a mental-health worker.
Still, she finds herself fighting constantly against the notion that Chanel brought on her own death.
“They think we’re making a big deal,” she said. “People say, ‘Let it rest, already.’
“Well, I’m not going to let it rest. I’m not going to let go until I find justice for her.”