Friend Beppy Gietema:

Holding on to Zoe

When Beppy Gietema graduated from Booker T., she and Zoe took a three-week trip to the Netherlands. The two friends listened to music and danced in the aisles of the plane while everyone was asleep, setting the tone for an eventful trip.

Spontaneity and joy drew Beppy to Zoe in the first place. They went to renaissance fairs and made movies together, listened to reggae on the way to Torchy’s Tacos and left googly eyes on hot sauce bottles.

Beppy, who attends the Savannah College of Art and Design, started getting calls and text messages the day Zoe went missing. Finally she got ahold of Zoe’s mom, who told her that her best friend was dead.

“The words will never leave me,” she says. “They are crisp in my mind.”

When she learned of Zoe’s death, Beppy cut off her ponytail, which she keeps in a box of letters and pictures of the two of them. Zoe’s death crushed Beppy’s spirit.

“She was the first person that I lost that I really loved,” she says. “I lost half of myself.”

Beppy is off at college, but moving on from the memory of her friend is not something she wants to do.

“I don’t know how you can move on. I don’t want to leave her in my past. I want to bring her with me wherever I can.”

CRIMINAL UPDATE: ANTONIO

COCHRAN, 37, was convicted of the murder of Zoe Hastings and sentenced to life in prison in January 2018. Though the Dallas County District Attorney sought the death penalty for capital murder, Cochran was ruled intellectually disabled, so he was convicted of a lesser charge of murder. Cochran will be eligible for parole in 30 years.

Sober Solution

At The Magdalen House, women learn to live happy, joyous and free

Story by WILL MADDOX I Photos by DANNY FULGENCIO

AINSLEY DAVID WAS POWERLESS over alcohol and her life had become unmanageable. She hadn’t finished school at Appalachian State University in North Carolina and was working at a gas station. And drinking. A lot.

“Basically, my life was falling apart,” she says.

Her family had moved to Texas, but came to visit and quickly realized that her situation was desperate. “We have to get you out of here,” they told her. Alcoholism ran in the family, and David’s father had asked if she wanted help when she was 18. “I was always the girl that got too crazy, and it was funny when I was younger,” she says.

“But I knew in the back of my mind, there is really something different compared to my other friends.”

She moved to Texas and lived with her stepsister, but things didn’t improve right away.

She discovered Xanax and continued to drink. She thought that if pills were her major issue, alcohol would pale in comparison and she could keep drinking. But eventually she realized that alcohol was the addiction she needed to beat.

David tried sober living and other treatment options, but nothing seemed to stick. After another relapse, a friend recommended that she call The Magdalen House, a costfree recovery community for women in Little Forest Hills where neighborhood association president Patrick Blaydes says they have been stellar neighbors.

She called, went through the screening process and moved in the next day. She started with the facility’s two-week social detox program, where women live in the home, do chores around the house, go to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings and get sober.

David immediately felt comfortable and fell asleep after a hard night of drinking the day before. The next morning, one of her new housemates made her toast.

Maggie’s House, as it is known, has been in Little Forest Hills for 22 years and focuses on peer-to-peer recovery. There is staff at the house, but volunteers in the recovery community lead most of the workshops, classes and other programs. Clients find sponsors who help guide them through