They lined the benches and crowded the courthouse hallway, laughing and teasing and greeting each other with hugs ? how was the drive … the baby?s grown so big … isn?t it a relief this is over.
Breaunna Floyd left behind a huge, tight-knit family when she was stabbed to death at age 13 in the summer of 2005. Her aunts, uncles and cousins were there in September when a Baltimore County jury convicted Breaunna?s stepfather, Carl Evans, of killing the teen and burning their Essex home to cover it up.
And on Tuesday her relatives came back to watch a judge sentence Evans to life in prison without parole.
“We, in this family, believe that our children are worth dying for,” Hillary Gaston, Breaunna?s great-uncle, said in court. “We are sorely missing one of our daughters, one of our own.”
Evans spoke to the court, too, and offered an apology ? without saying he killed Breaunna ? before receiving his sentence. In a quiet voice he said that he had invited untrustworthy people into his life before the murder and told the court, “I have to take on some sort of guilty because it was my actions, and no one else?s, that led to this.”
“It cost me everything,” he told the judge, in front of the crowded gallery. “I love my family, including my family that?s sitting here.”
Gaston said he wanted to ask Evans why he turned on Breaunna that July day, just after she hung up the phone with a friend to help with housework, according to court testimony.
Firefighters later discovered Breaunna?s body, slippery with blood, in her smoke-filled bedroom. They carried her infant half-sister to safety after finding the baby in a crib. Evans reportedly fled the scene.
Gaston said that when Breaunna?s mother, Kenya, brought Evans to meet the extended family he was welcomed, “no questions asked.”
“We knew nothing about him, but she said she loved him,” Gaston said. “This was a betrayal beyond any magnitude.”
