MEMPHIS, Tenn. — For many, the holiday season is a time to get together with family, but the season can be difficult for those who have lost a loved one.
A local church is taking steps to spread the love this year after a member of its congregation was murdered, leaving behind her two young boys.
“It’s tough. Thanksgiving was weird, very very hard for us,” Vaness Terry said. “Vanity loved the holidays and she loved to cook for us. She was a blessing to people- she loved to do and give.”
Terry is about to experience her first Christmas since her daughter, Vanity Macklin, was murdered back in October while driving through Whitehaven with her two sons.
For her grandchildren, it will be their first Christmas without a mother.
Pastor Tara Crawford of the Redeemed Empowerment Center in Oakhaven said she knew Macklin for a decade.
She and the other parishioners have felt her loss every Sunday.
The church hopes to keep Macklin’s memory alive by holding a toy drive for children who have lost parents in her name.
“We wanted to do what Vanity would do,” Crawford said. “Because she would give, give, give to everybody.”
Crawford said Macklin was known in her church community as a generous woman who once covered the cost of food for 500 people at the REC’s Easter fair.
“That’s just the heart she had behind everything,” she said.
After seeing how the congregation and Macklin’s family came together to help care for her two young sons, Crawford decided to hold a toy drive to help out children who have faced similar tragedies but lack a support system.
“We have blessed them and they have an amazing family,” she said. “We realized that there are children who don’t really have that and aren’t as fortunate.”
Just days after the drive started, the REC already has enough toys to fill up the church’s entryway.
“It is overwhelming,” Terry said of the response.
She said she is touched to see her daughter’s legacy kept alive through such kindness.
“This is a great honor for us,” Terry said. “We are excited about being able to help other children that are in the same shoes as my grandboys.”
She said the holidays were already going to be tough for her and her grandsons given their mother’s death, but it’s made even tougher by the fact there have not been any arrests in the case.
“Someone took her away from us. They shot her in the car with her boys,” Terry said. “The closure is not going to bring her back to us, but it would give us some kind of satisfaction to get this coward off the street.”
The Redeemed Empowerment Center is accepting toys until Dec. 12.
They will be handed out on Dec. 17.
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