After the shooting, the coroner’s office staff had taken care to return salvageable items found on the victims’ bodies and in the fellowship hall. One woman had found and cleaned Felicia’s purse. She was grateful for the woman’s efforts, but what Felicia really wanted back was her Bible.
“You don’t want it,” the woman had cautioned.
“Yes, I do want it.”
“We don’t think you want it ...”
“You can keep everything,” Felicia said. “I want my Bible.”
That Bible, however, had been tossed in the trash, thrown away with other things that seemed too damaged to return to victims’ families.
When police Lieutenant Jennie Antonio caught wind of that conversation, she didn’t dismiss Felicia’s request as impossible. A devoted Catholic, she understood what the Bible meant to the grieving mother. She also had been working with a national FBI rapid response team that flew in to help local police agencies and victim advocates handle mass casualty events. The team’s members had dealt with tragedies at places like Sandy Hook Elementary and brought with them critical lessons learned — including that many of the devastated parents had wanted their children’s personal effects, like backpacks and drawings, no matter how damaged. The FBI team also had discovered a Texas company that could salvage even the most blood-soaked items.
There sat a dark leather-bound Bible soaked in blood. A bullet had pierced its pages.
So, five days after the shooting, Antonio had called an FBI counterpart and soon drove to the first of two storage buildings that housed biohazards that cleaning crews at Emanuel had thrown away. There, they hauled out several big plastic bins that contained the life, and death, of nine people. In suffocating heat, with gloved hands, Antonio had rummaged through sticky papers that clung to what looked like a dark brownish-red bed sheet. She had peered beneath it. And there sat a dark leather-bound Bible soaked in blood. A bullet had pierced its pages.
She opened the cover, then plied apart pages. Stuck between two, a little torn-off piece of what might have been a receipt bore a name: Felicia Sanders.
Antonio had carefully wrapped it up and sent it to the company in Texas. Two months later, a box appeared in her mail.
Antonio soon drove down the winding road to Felicia’s home and knocked on the Sanderses’ front door. Felicia greeted her. Though her eyes were fogged with grief, Felicia managed to smile in welcome. Antonio sensed the tremendous effort it took for the survivor to greet the endless stream of people needing to talk with her for the investigation, random...
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