get shot?’... Then when they said she didn’t make it, I just kind of lost it.” Telling Samantha’s mother fell to Doucet. Phyllis Lyles-Vontungeln lives in Pine Bluff, where Samantha was raised from the age of 2. No night owl, Lyles-Vontungeln said she goes to bed just after the KLRT news at 9 p.m. She’d seen the same footage from JFK and McCain as her ex-husband had. “Just for a brief second,” she said, “it crossed my mind: Samantha goes there all the time. That’s over where she lives. Then it left my mind, because I thought, she isn’t out at night. It never occurred to me that might have happened earlier in the evening.” Lyles-Vontungeln went on to bed and was asleep when the phone rang around 10:30 p.m. She knew it was bad when she heard Stan’s voice. “I started walking to go outside because I knew something had to be wrong for him to be calling me at that time of the night,” she said. “Then he told me, ‘Phyllis, Samantha’s dead.’ And I said, ‘No!’ I just collapsed. I was screaming and crying, because that’s my baby. Why would something like that happen to my baby? She was good. She didn’t have nobody mad at her. She didn’t know bad people. She didn’t acquaint herself with people who would be that way. I couldn’t understand, and I still don’t understand.” Stan Doucet said that Linnea was Samantha’s everything — that she went from “60 watts to 100 watts” when it became apparent she’d carry the child to term after years of frustration and heartache. He laughed while talking about how Samantha
bought clothes for her “six months in advance,” Samantha, Lyles-Vontungeln said, was an all-around good person, a friend to everyone, filling a closet with things, planning what the girl would be wearing. independent, kind, a woman who had made her “She was always planning,” he said. “Even before own way and asked for nothing. She said her the baby was born, she was buying clothes. It was daughter called her every day, usually on the way to an amazing thing that a person can go from no work, just to chit-chat. When Lyles-Vontungeln was child to being the perfect mother. That’s what she treated for lung cancer in 2009 and 2010, Samantha was to me.” drove down from Little Rock to sit with her for the His daughter was friendly with everyone, half-day-long treatments. Doucet said, which makes the idea that she would “I’d tell her, ‘Baby, you don’t have to come down meet a violent end all the more confusing. Doucet here every time momma has chemo,’ ” she said. said that the fact that his daughter’s killer is still at “ ‘You don’t have to make this trip. You have other large is just beyond his comprehension. things to do. You have a life now.’ And she’d say, “It’s just not right that my daughter is dead and ‘Momma, it’s OK. I brought a book with me to read.’ this person is still out there,” he said. “It just doesn’t She loved to read.” Lyles-Vontungeln said that one of the saddest balance out. I don’t know what else they can do. With the cameras they had, they followed this truck things is that when Samantha died, her life had supposedly — videoed this truck — all the way down finally come together the way she had always to Camp Robinson into Levy, and it just seems wanted: husband, child, degree, blossoming career impossible that they don’t have a license number as an accountant. “She had reached her happiness on this vehicle.” in life,” she said. “She had accomplished her dreams, Though losing his daughter wounded him and she was about to go back to college and work for terribly, knowing that Linnea will grow up without her master’s. She was happy. But I just tell myself her mother is a pain that grinds at Doucet. “She that it was God’s will. I don’t know why, and I won’t have the privilege of knowing that her mother can’t answer them questions. But there had to be a purpose.” was a good person. She won’t have the privilege of knowing that her mother was loved by other people. For her part of that purpose, Lyles-Vontungeln She won’t have the privilege of that mother being intends to tell Linnea about her mother someday, there when she’s sick or when her heart aches, or how Samantha loved her, how proud Samantha during her problems in life. Her mother’s not going would have been of her. She hopes she lives long CONTINUED ON PAGE 20 to be there to tell her it’s all right.”
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FEBRUARY 27, 2014
ARKANSAS TIMES