The pain Carmen Guzman said she feels will not end, though the criminal case against her daughter’s accused killer did Thursday.
“I couldn’t believe that my beloved daughter was dead,” Guzman said in a statement that was read by her daughter’s friend. “My heart, my life and my soul had gone with my daughter.”
Guzman, the mother of 25-year-old Julissa Brisman, wrote an emotional victim impact statement that was read Thursday.
It was something Brisman’s family eventually hoped to do face-to-face with Philip Markoff, the former Boston University medical student and accused murderer who killed himself in his Nashua Street Jail cell last month.
Prosecutors on Thursday legally terminated the case against Markoff, known as the Craigslist killer. It was something Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley would rather not have done.
“Sometimes we have to tell people that justice is not always in this world,” he said. “In this case I wish it had been, but it’s not going to be.”
Brisman’s mother spoke just before the re-dedication of the Garden of Peace, a memorial for homicide victims.
A river stone with Brisman’s name was added to the memorial Thursday, but it was hardly the only one. Some family members come to the re-dedication even years after their loved one was killed.
“It really helps because you see other people go through the same thing and we get together and talk about the grief,” said Pearlena McKenzie, whose 19-year-old grandson, Damaine Brown, was fatally shot in Mattapan in 2005.
