INDIANAPOLIS — Antonia Bailey still can't hear the sounds of sirens without remembering the day she pulled into her east side apartment complex and heard the same sound and saw the flashing police lights.
Bailey can still remember the people staring at her as she walked up to the yellow crime scene tape around the apartment where she lived with her three children.
"They tell me people were staring because they couldn't understand how I was holding it together," Bailey says.
Today, some of those same people still live at Post Brook Apartments and recognize Bailey immediately, even though she hasn't lived there since that day four years ago.
“Thank you, I appreciate it,” Bailey says to a man who sees her from an upstairs window, shouting down to her that he remembers what happened that day and still prays for her.
Bailey doesn’t visit often. Only a few times year. That's all she can handle.
“It’s the spot that my world changed, my life changed,” Bailey says.
It’s the place where her two eldest children took their last breaths.
“On August 29th, 2019, someone came into my home and killed my older children while they were getting ready for school. Nicholas was 16 and Ashlynn was 15,” Bailey explains, recalling the details of that horrific day like they happened just yesterday.
That morning, Bailey remembers leaving early to drop off her youngest child at daycare and then head to work.
She also remembers the inescapable feeling that something wasn’t right.
“The feeling that was going through my body was indescribable,” Bailey remembers. "It was like my nerve endings was going crazy and I was like, 'I don’t know what’s wrong with me, this doesn’t feel right,'” Bailey says she kept telling herself that morning.
She knows now it was her mother’s intuition, sensing her children fighting for their lives.
“We are so in tune with our children,” Bailey says. “We carried them in our wombs for nine months. I think while they were literally going through Hades, I was feeling what they were feeling, not even knowing.”
Then Bailey got the call that changed her life forever. She was told that someone had come into her family’s home and shot and killed Nicholas and Ashlynn.
“That literally was the worst day of my life,” Bailey says.
Later, when Bailey was able to go back into her home, signs of her children’s desperate fight to survive were everywhere.
“Bullet holes within the walls, just in random places,” Bailey said.
She says police believe Nicholas was downstairs at first and heard something and went upstairs.
“Nicholas came up there to defend his sister and not even knowing what he was walking into,” Bailey says.
Surveillance cameras outside later showed Ashlynn running out the front door and looking around for help.
“She went back in because she couldn’t leave her brother,” Bailey said.
“Part of me wishes she’d ran because I would have still had her here,” Bailey adds, her voice shaking with emotion. “But I know if she would have survived, I wouldn’t have been able to save my baby because of the guilt."
There are some details this mother can’t bear to know even now.
“I don’t know, nor do I want to know, how many times my baby was shot,” Bailey says of her son.
“But I know he shot Nicholas multiple times and Nicholas kept fighting,” said Bailey. She said Ashlynn was shot in the head.
“I found out he was just a baby himself,” Bailey says.
He was just 15. At his sentencing, Bailey told him that she forgave him.
“I let him know I wouldn’t be able to make a positive impact in anyone’s life if I can’t speak to one positively that tore my life apart,” she explains.
The impact this mother hoped to make in the wake of her children’s deaths has brought her downtown, working for the city as a non-fatal shooting advocate and support specialist. Every week, Bailey reaches out to people who have survived being shot or assaulted.
“Some weeks, it’s majority youth, some weeks it’s not,” says Bailey. “No child is built for this. “No parent is built for this. When you are impacted by a senseless act of gun violence or gun violence, period, you lose a part of yourself, regardless of if you walk away. That stays with you. You are no longer that person that you were before you were shot.”
In the less than two years since the outreach program began, Bailey and her fellow advocates have reached out to some 800 survivors.
Bailey has also started a non-profit in Nicholas and Ashlynn’s memory called The Untold Foundation. At the start of every school year, she hands out school supplies to kids. At Christmas, she hosts a toy drive. In the summer months, she holds a “Youth Discovery Expo” to set teens up with summer jobs.
“This work is part of the journey of making sure that children are able to see life further than my children were able to,” said Bailey.
That journey through her own grief and healing recently came with an unexpected detour when Bailey reached out to the young man who murdered her children.
“Nicholas and Ashlynn are OK. They’re safe. He’s not,” Bailey explains.
She still can’t speak his name out loud, but Bailey wrote a letter and sent books to the man serving 40 years in prison.
“I cried the entire time,” Bailey says of the moment she ordered the books she would eventually send.
One was a book of daily prayers, scriptures and devotions for young Black men in prison. The other was a book of letters between a mother and her son who’s behind bars.
Here’s the letter Bailey wrote:
"This gesture is one of the hardest for me to complete. Harder than when I chose to forgive, harder than when I sat behind you in the courtroom, watching your mom hug you and tell you that she loved you, knowing that I’d never be able to do the same. Harder than observing you read through all of the paperwork and thinking, ‘He’s a very intelligent young man.’ And so much harder than the first time I prayed for you. Like God told me, ‘Nicholas and Ashlynn are safe.’ But you are not. As August 23rd approaches, the day that changed the trajectory of both of our lives, and ended Nicholas and Ashlynn’s, you’ve been placed on my heart yet again and I decided to send you these items.”
“I figured even if he chose not to keep the books, maybe he’ll give them to someone that will help them,” Bailey said.
Several weeks later, she received a letter back.
“The amount of emotions and fears and everything that was going through me, anger set in,” Bailey says.
It took her a day just to open the envelope. What she noticed first was what she says was beautiful handwritten cursive.
“It humanized him.”
Here’s the letter Bailey received back:
“Miss Bailey, for years I’ve thought about this day, but I never thought it would actually happen. Reading your letter, your words touched my heart. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the damage that I brung into your life, the chaos, the imbalance. No mother should have to endure what I put you through and I know there’s nothing I can do that will change what happened. There’s nothing I can say that will heal your pain, but I want you to know that I’m truly sorry. I hate who I was. I hate what I did. What I did was horrible. I hurt a lot of people. I don’t want to hurt anybody else. And I don’t know if it matters, but I’m not just in here, existing. I’m not sitting idle. I’m doing all I can to better myself. I sew blankets and stuffed animals for orphans. I grow and can vegetables for local pantries and I’ve started and completed several programs. I’m also a youth advocate. I regret the role I played on August 23rd, 2019, and I want you to know I am no longer that 15-year-old boy. Miss Bailey, thank you for your letter. Thank you for your books. I am entirely grateful. I hope one day, I can give you a proper apology.”
Bailey doesn’t know when or if she’ll ever be ready for that day to come. She does have a picture in her mind’s eye, though, that she says won’t go away, a vision she says that’s been there since the day her children were killed.
“From the time that they were taken, before even knowing who he was, I’ve seen myself sitting across from someone behind bars,” Bailey explains.
“I ain’t there. I’m not there. Is all I can say. I can’t speak of the future, but I’m not there,” she said.
Where this mother is, though, is somewhere she never thought she’d be after losing Nicholas and Ashlynn. Somewhere in between utter devastation and healing, with her children never far from her mind.
“Yes, I’m still hurting, but I’m still moving forward and want to make a difference.”