INDIANAPOLIS — Moments of her mom singing and dancing are the ones Amarah Ivy tries to remember as she makes arrangements to bury her mother.
"She liked to dance around. She loved to sing. She loved making faces and weird noises," Ivy said.
Jasmine Ivy-Dede was one of the two people fatally shot inside a pickup truck that eventually crashed on Michigan Road and Grandview Drive Monday morning.
On Jan. 4, the Marion County Prosecutor's Office charged 52-year-old Jason Lapsley, of Indianapolis, with two counts of murder.
According to court documents, Lapsley told witnesses that he was supposed to be getting driven home by his brother. He allegedly said that when he woke up, he thought two different people were in the car with him — even saying he believed they had been carjacked.
Lapsley said he asked where his brother was and was told, "Don't worry about it. I'm taking you home." He claimed he then heard a clicking noise coming from the woman that he interpreted as her racking a gun. Lapsley allegedly said he pulled his gun and shot the man and woman in the back before running. The Indianapolis Fire Department confirmed the man who died was was engineer Justin Boyd II, the suspect's brother.
Ivy said Lapsley is a complete stranger.
"She was really close to home when she crashed. She was just around the corner. So, I think about him taking her life and I'm like, I don't know. You could've waited. She could've come here, she wouldn't have been in the car, and then you could've done whatever it was that you were going to do," Ivy said.
Although Ivy-Dede's life may have been cut short, her smirk lives on through her daughter – and so do the lessons she taught her.
"She always told me how proud of me she was and how beautiful I am. More recently, the more she would tell me, I would be like, you know what, you're right. How could I be ugly when I look like her? She's so beautiful. She's so beautiful," Ivy said as she sobbed.
As Ivy sat wrapped in her mother's Michael Jordan hoodie with the countless memories coming to mind, she recalls her mom as being magical.
"She used to sing this song. I don't know what the song was called, it was, 'Oh, oh, oh, it's magic.' She would sing that a lot. All the time. Just randomly. And I'd be like, 'You still love that song, huh?' She barely knows it. That's the only part she ever sang," Ivy said.
Ivy-Dede graduated from IU McKinney where she studied law.
Ivy was her only child, and she's getting her master's in industrial organizational psychology.