Tuquilah Carter is convinced her father would still be alive today had he been granted permission to travel to the United States.The 28-year-old daughter of Raymond ‘Yankee’ Rawlins wanted him to leave Bermuda, where he’d been targeted by gunmen, and move close to her in Elizabeth, New Jersey.She spent countless hours before his death trying to secure him a visa, but a string of criminal convictions prevented Mr Rawlins from entering America.On Friday, David Cox was found guilty of the premeditated murder of Mr Rawlins.“He told me that if he didn’t get in trouble for seven years then he could come here or they would give him his visa but they never did it,” she said. “That’s what I was fighting [for], to try to get him up here.”Still, the distance in miles between parent and child and the many years they went without seeing each other did nothing to estrange them.“Me and my father was real close,” says Ms Carter, the eldest of Yankee’s nine children. “Me and my daddy were really cool. You know, you are your daddy’s first baby. I was still his baby, even though I grew older and had kids.”During her childhood, Ms Carter saw her father regularly on his visits to the States to stay with her mother, as well as when she spent Christmas and summer vacations in Bermuda.Eventually, Mr Rawlins, who spent much of his youth in New Jersey, was barred from travelling to the US and his daughter stopped coming to the Island, as she missed her family too much.She had not seen him in person for more than a decade before his death.“I regret that,” she says. “I wanted to come. He [her father] wanted me to live with him. But I have got brothers and sisters up here too.”Ms Carter’s mother died when she was 16 and she came to rely heavily on the support she got from her Bermuda-based father.The pair would speak on the phone or text every day and he was devastated not to be able to travel to New Jersey when Ms Carter had her first child, daughter I’Tayjah.Ms Carter says it was a difficult pregnancy and she would call her father each time she left the hospital after a scan.“It used to worry him. He used to try and get up here. I used to try and get him up here but it just didn’t work. He had to send my grandmother over when my daughter was born to check up on her.”I’Tayjah died in 2007, aged just four months, and Mr Rawlins told a court at the start of last year, when he was convicted of cocaine possession, that grief led him to relapse into his former drug addiction.Ms Carter has since had a son, Jahyohn, two, who never met his late grandfather but will hear all about him when he’s old enough.“I’m going to tell him how he was a great father,” she says. “He helped me give my first birthday party [for Jahyohn]. He sent me money so I could do him a nice birthday party.“He helped with my daughter’s funeral. I have diabetes and he helped me pay for my medicine.”She says though the self-confessed former drug dealer and crack addict may have had a tough-guy reputation on the Island, he was a loving father to his children.“He was protective of his kids. He wanted his kids to do something with their lives.”She adds she never heard of him hurting anybody, least of all being involved with guns.“He’s not that type of person and if anybody knows him, they would know that. My father is not about violence. He wouldn’t hurt anybody. He would just try to help people.”She can’t understand what led David Cox to murder her father and questions whether she’ll ever find out.“I just want to know why did he do this,” she says. “I have seen his picture in the paper. I have seen his name. I want to know why. Why did he do that? Why did he kill him? Was there a reason to do it?“I just want my father to rest in peace and I just want the person that killed him, he needs to spend the rest of his life in jail. He took him away from his kids. They threw a good person away.“This is something I’m not ever going to get over. I can’t get over it. I want to know why. I will never know why.”Ms Carter came to Bermuda for the first time since she was a teenager for her father’s funeral in August, when she says the packed church made her realise how much he was loved.But the words spoken at the ceremony did little to comfort her. “Everybody says he is in a better place. I understand that; I would just rather have my father here.”Bermuda no longer seems the idyllic holiday isle of her childhood and the “bad area” of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she lives no longer seems so dangerous.