A little girl will never know her father
Raymond ‘Yankee’ Rawlins didn’t know he was due to become a father for the ninth time when he was gunned down by David Cox on August 9 last year.His youngest child, a girl, was born just a few months ago, according to his daughter Tuquilah Carter.Ms Carter, 28, told The Royal Gazette her father was unaware of his partner’s pregnancy when he was fatally shot at Spinning Wheel nightclub.“He just had a newborn; she’s like three or four months,” said Ms Carter, the eldest of her father’s six daughters and three sons. “The baby was just like me and all the other girls. We all look the same.“My little brother just turned two. He’s not even going to know what’s going on. I have got little brothers that will grow up without a father and that’s going to be hard on them.“My father always provided for his kids. He always made sure that we didn’t want for anything. Now that he’s not here it’s just like ‘who is going to do this for us?’.”Ms Carter broke down crying when she heard a jury unanimously convicted gang member Cox, 31, of murdering her father and using a gun to commit the crime.Speaking from her home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, she told this newspaper: “I’m happy with the verdict. They said two people shot him and they only got one so I think justice won’t be served until they get everybody that had a part in it.“This gives me some type of comfort but it’s never going to bring my father back. Nobody knows how I feel. I don’t have my father to call and make everything better. I don’t have that no more. It really hurts.”Cox should spend the rest of his life behind bars for killing her father, she said.“I don’t know him at all but I know my father knew him. They said at one point him and my father were friends. This is what I don’t understand.“I wish I could talk to him face to face and ask him why. What was the reason? Sixteen times that’s just hate, hatred. Was it that you had that much hatred that you had to kill my father and shoot him that many times?”