Remembering Kasi Perkins on the 10th anniversary of her murder by a Chiefs player
Ten years since the murder of her daughter, Kasi Perkins, her mother knows enough about the never-ending anguish that she sometimes feels like a “professional griever” who could write a book about it.
About what to say and not say to someone suffering from the searing loss like no other and, in her case, how grateful she has been to friends who knew to just sit silently at her side.
About the solace to be found in honoring the memory of the lives of the victims against the never-ending challenge of separating that from how they died.
And about how the grief arrives in random waves, with no linear pattern, and how some things might help for a while and then just hurt.
For all that volatility, though, she knows this:
“You can’t get around it,” Becky Martinez said in her home on Tuesday, two days before the 10th anniversary of Kasi’s murder. “That only delays the process. And if you turn to something negative, alcohol or whatever, you’re still only delaying the process. You have to go through it.
“It’s like going through a forest. To get to the other side, you have to go through it.”
That helps explain why her greatest consolation often is to be found some three hours away at her daughter’s gravesite.
On her visits to the Capital Parks Cemetery in Pflugerville, Texas, Martinez will spend hours there. She’ll tend the grounds around the grave, scrub the granite and clean out the dirt within an enclosed picture of Kasi.
Then she’ll put a blanket over the gravestone and lie down on it.
Because even as an adult, Kasi had this habit of sprawling out over her.
“She always did it to me,” she said, laughing. “So I do it to her. Because she would love that.”
Then she sits and talks to Kasi as if she were there with her, even though she knows her spirit is in Heaven, while she works on various flower arrangements and decorations.
That’s what she did last Sunday on a trip she makes for the changing of each season and on occasions such as Kasi’s birthday in October and now with Christmas and winter ahead.
Befitting the radiant daughter whose “outgoing spirit and love for life” is engraved on the headstone, she said, “glitter is a big player.”
This time the flourishes included poinsettias and a wooden angel and an oversized Styrofoam cupcake and lollipop.
That’s another thing about grief.
“Not everything’s logical,” she said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”
A mirror shattered
Over the years, as she’s processed the murder of her 22-year-old daughter by Kasi’s boyfriend and Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who shortly thereafter committed suicide in the parking lot of the Chiefs’ training facility near Arrowhead Stadium, Martinez has learned this analogy to describe the infinite pain.
“When you lose your child in the way that I did, I liken it to a mirror shattering on the ground,” she said, a subtle quiver in her voice. “And there’s like a thousand pieces that have to heal. And every one of those pieces is a different aspect.”
Like the loss of the mother-daughter relationship and the pain it has caused right into the center of her bones. And the deep void for Kasi’s two siblings.
And trying to reconcile the goals Kasi had in her life, such as wanting to become a social worker. And what all those people who considered Kasi their best friend are left to deal with.
Looming over everything is Kasi not being able to bring up her daughter, Zoey, who is being raised in the loving care of a cousin of Kasi’s and her family in Texas.
“It’s no wonder it’s such a lengthy process …” she said, later adding, “Year four, I went into a deep depression. That I didn’t think I was going to make it out of. And then year five, I came to the acceptance phase. And that’s probably about the first time I could talk about her.”
As she has in several conversations and visits with The Star over the years, Martinez wanted to talk about Kasi again now to illuminate her life but also to speak to the ravages of domestic homicide and domestic violence.
The site also reports “72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner and 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female.”
Just last month, Dr. Beth Frost, a native of Odessa, Missouri, was murdered in Dallas by her husband, Jed Frost, a former Missouri basketball player who then killed himself. Beth Frost was an accomplished medical examiner and revered mother of two, recently memorialized for “the brilliance of her soul.”
Contending with the murderer is its own type of agony — and can be all the more so when it’s someone who had been a public figure, Martinez said.
Martinez was relieved not to have to experience a trial. But she considers that “a double-edged sword,” because she had no place to put her anger.
“I had to give it to God, and knowing that He’s just, I trust that He will give her justice,” she said. “And I always went back to when Cain killed Abel and God heard his blood cry from the ground.
“I feel that if God could hear his blood cry from the ground, He can hear my daughter’s. And I had to come to peace with that, knowing that’s my only way of getting justice. Because I was robbed of that.”
In 2014, The Star reported that an analysis of Belcher’s brain after he’d been exhumed showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy — better known as CTE, a degenerative brain disease found to cause dementia, confusion, depression and aggression.
Martinez has her doubts about that but declined to comment further on this particular subject.
‘Such a blessing’
At a celebration of Kasi’s life on the one-year anniversary of her death, the LoneStar Cheer Dance group to which she had once belonged performed one of her favorite songs, “Lean On Me,” as members walked around the pews of the Memorial Chapel at Cook-Walden Funeral Home in Pflugerville.
When they urged the 50 or so people in attendance to follow along, Kasi’s sister, Angela Moore, cradled Zoey at the front of the line and held her aloft just as a slideshow of Kasi’s life began.
It was a profound scene to witness.
And it spoke to the vital place Zoey held then and now in the hearts of Martinez and other family members.
After the ceremony that day in Pflugerville, about 25 minutes northeast of Austin, Martinez thought of all the ways Zoey reminded her of Kasi. Even to the point of her having flashes of “Kasi, is that you?”
Today, she says, “She’s all I have left of my daughter. Thank God we have her. It’s such a blessing that we have part of Kasi here.”
Zoey is 10 now and becoming herself through the beautiful family that Martinez prefers not to name out of concerns for her privacy and well-being.
Zoey only knows “certain things,” she said, including who her birth parents are.
“But she has not been exposed to all of the ugliness,” Martinez said.
Truth be told, another granddaughter (Kasi’s brother’s daughter) happily and unexpectedly reminds them of Kasi with her personality and antics — so much so that if Martinez believed in reincarnation, it would be in the form of her.
Zoey, though, still makes certain expressions just like her mother. And she’s an inspiration and joy all her own.
“She’s very articulate. She has her life all planned out,” Martinez said. “Very academic. And she’s in all kinds of activities. Sports, dance and cheerleading. She just always has a lot going on.”
‘She would really like that’
Visiting home in Texas with Zoey two weeks before she was murdered, Kasi was intent on having a five-generation family photo taken. She pushed so hard for it at the time that Martinez thought it was because Kasi’s great grandmother was in her 90s.
Now, she feels like it was divine intervention to create a cherished and lasting memory, and even to provide a chance to say farewell.
To this day, Martinez can “absolutely” still smell the leather jacket Kasi wore as they hugged goodbye for the last time.
She still hears her voice. And she still feels her presence.
“A lot of times I think, ‘Is that you?’ ” she said.
She revels in the endless images of her smiles and warm and charming and silly ways. In the memories that sometimes make Martinez laugh and sometimes make her cry and sometimes do both at once.
She celebrates her in a shadow box of Kasi’s pictures and birth announcement and trinkets that also features Zoey’s baby socks. And with a life-affirming picture in the front hall of a butterfly landing on Kasi’s stomach when she was pregnant with Zoey.
She sometimes pays homage to her by wearing her jewelry to family gatherings and special events. And most of all at her grave, where Martinez often will find fresh decorations and flowers left by Kasi’s friends, all these years later.
When she buried Kasi there in 2012, a young oak tree had been planted nearby.
“And now,” Martinez said, “it’s growing over her.”
Another part of the serenity she often finds watching over her daughter as best she can there.
“I’ve spent a fortune decorating her grave,” she said. “Some people say, ‘It’s a waste of money; what are you doing that for?’
“Because I like it. And I enjoy it. And it’s beautiful. And I know she would really like that.”
