CHILD’S
MURDER INSPIRES MOM

Topics: Conversion; Crime; Forgiveness; Freedom; Murder; New Life

References: Genesis 50:15–21; Matthew 18:15–35; Ephesians 2:10; 1 Peter 4:12–19

Yvonne Pointer was one of ten children born to a wonderful mother and father, though she admits, “I was the worst. I did everything my parents did not want me to do.”

For three years a friend of her father tried to reach her. “He would come to where I was getting high and say, ‘You need to change your ways.’ He was a thorn in my flesh,” Pointer says. But in time the high turned on her. Then she remembered the words of her father’s friend, went to church, and cried out to God. And on May 4, 1975, she turned her life over to Christ.

Less than ten years later, Pointer experienced what some say is the greatest pain on earth—the loss of a child. On December 6, 1984, her daughter Gloria was raped and murdered while on her way to school in Cleveland, Ohio. “After she died, I would spend hours in the church when no one was there, because Gloria’s death didn’t make sense to me,” Pointer says. “I had come through drugs, through street life—and now this? I could not fathom why this would happen. But because I’d had that personal experience with God, I went to God.”

People from the church rallied around her, washing clothes, cooking, and cleaning when the mother didn’t have the strength. Slowly, a new sense of direction emerged. “In the beginning it was all about the injustice done to my child. Period,” Pointer says. But soon she became aware of others with similar losses. She wrote letters and talked to police, to reporters, and to anyone who would listen.

Meantime, Pointer cofounded Parents Against Child Killing, which later became Positive Plus, a women-helping-women organization. “We started out with mothers who had lost children,” Pointer says, “but I found out pain is pain. If your husband walked out and left you with five babies, that’s pain. We felt we could find solutions by helping each other.”

Pointer has received numerous honors for her work as an advocate for child safety. She even speaks in prisons, sharing the love of God with inmates. “I found hatred too heavy a load to carry. Would I want the person who murdered Gloria over for Sunday dinner? No. But if I didn’t forgive him, unforgiveness would kill me too,” she says quietly. “Forgiveness releases you to live.”

—Audrey T. Hingley, “Gloria’s Legacy,” Today’s Christian (May–June 2006)