SPRINGFIELD TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- Charles Murph’s mother visits him every Sunday.
The 18-year-old Springfield Township resident was shot dead while answering his front door in the early hours of Sept. 30, 2015. And on Sept. 30, 2016, his friends and family said they know as little about his death now as they did then.
“It’s tearing me apart," said his mother, Karen Tye, at his grave in Spring Grove Cemetery on Friday. “It really is. As of now, no one came forward."
The facts, as Tye relates them, are these: On that morning in September, a woman knocked on the door to the family’s home and asked if she could use their telephone. Tye turned her away. When another knock came an hour later, Charles was the one who moved to answer the door.
Before he could open it, a bullet shattered the glass and struck him in the face.
“He fell in my arms and said, ‘Mom, I’ve been shot,’ and me and him rolled across the floor," Tye said. “I called police, screaming, and he died in my living room right in front of me."
He died around 2:45 a.m.
Tye makes a weekly pilgrimage to his headstone, which reads, “Our angel Chuck is waiting in heaven." On Friday, the one-year anniversary of his death, friends and family accompanied her for a vigil.
"I was really proud of him,” said Rich Goldman, a former teacher of Murph’s. “When this happened, I think I quit school for about three days. I didn’t come to school."
Springfield Township police said they had nothing new to report on the case, but the people who attended the vigil said they refuse to give up hope. They’re offering a reward for information about his death, and they’re encouraging anyone who thinks they might know something to come forward.
“Just say something because it can be anybody," said Murph’s niece Davishia Chalk.
In the meantime, Tye will continue her visits to -- and conversations with -- the son she lost.
"I talk to him every morning,” she said. “I tell him, ‘You are up with the angels watching over me.’"
