Karrissa Danyelle Hamilton appears in three images. (Left and right via Silent Witness, center via obituary)
Karrissa Danyelle Hamilton was only 29 years old when she was shot and killed inside her own car earlier this year in an Arizona park.
It’s now been several months since that February shooting with seemingly no progress made in the formal investigation into her murder. Now, her family is asking for the public’s help.
“There’s a big void in our lives, she was the one that filled it,” the victim’s aunt, Patricia Brienza, said at a press conference with local law enforcement this week. “We cherished her, we loved her.”
On Sunday, Feb. 5, just after 11:00 p.m., Phoenix police responded to reports of a shooting at Steele Indian School Park. There, officers found Hamilton suffering from a lone gunshot wound in the parking lot on the park’s southeastern edge. She was inside her gray Nissan Altima and the engine was still running. Firefighters who also responded pronounced the young mother dead at the scene.
“I was Karrissa’s mother,” Sylvia Hamilton said through tears. “Karrissa was my only child. She was my world … Karrissa was very kind and humble – she liked doing things for people, but she always did it in the background where she didn’t expect recognition.”
The victim’s mother went on to discuss the “wonderful” way she was raising her son, 3-year-old Kyrie. He was also at the press conference. Family members said that Karrissa Hamilton, who was living with her mother and stepfather when she died, wanted to make a better life for her little boy.
“Every decision she made was for her son,” Brienza noted.
Karrissa Hamilton had degrees from Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University. She had recently moved to Phoenix and was an aspiring sports journalist, her family explained.
“She wanted to be on that sideline, in that locker room, didn’t matter the sport,” the victim’s great-uncle, David Giles, said. “She told me that her biggest nemesis was that dadgum teleprompter.”
Giles went on to say that his great-niece had something akin to an encyclopedic knowledge of sports facts – including cricket.
“You couldn’t stop her,” he continued. “You couldn’t stop her. It’s not only devastating to me. It’s devastating to the entire family.”
The weekend of her death, the woman traveled to Yuma for a family member’s baby shower, relatives told the TV station. She left for the two-and-a-quarter hour drive to Phoenix around noon on the day she died. Police have said they are not sure how long she had been dead in the car before the sad discovery was made.
“Never did I imagine that someone would have hurt her because she was a good person,” Brienza said. “She was a kind person.”
Over nine months later, law enforcement reportedly have few leads in the mysterious homicide. Police have echoed the family’s call for help.
“We see the hurt, the pain that the family has,” Phoenix Police Sgt. Brian Bower said as the press conference drew to a close. “We know somebody’s out there that has a little bit of information. And what we want to say from the deepest part of our heart is: come out. Be that one person to step up, and provide those details for detectives, so that we can find the person responsible for this. Even if you don’t have all the information – you don’t have all the knowledge, just that one small puzzle piece can help the detectives with their investigation.”
There is currently a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case. Of that reward, $8,000 was provided by the victim’s family. The additional $2,000 was provided by the nonprofit group Silent Witness, whose banners hung at the press conference.
“There’s not one second of the day that I don’t think about her,” Karrissa Hamilton’s dismayed mother said. “I really, really miss her, and they say that time heals. It’s been nine months and it seems to be getting worse every day. I don’t like being alone.”
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