Hannah Was Only 21: A Mom on Losing Her Daughter to Murder

Dear friends, Annika's kids were born in 2002, 2005, and 2007. She lived a life with all the totally “normal” worries and joys of a mom of three, until a murder split her family's life into a before and an after. She's telling her story not only here with us, but also in a podcast, about what happened to her and her family (definitely listen to it, and a second episode is coming soon).

She had been reading us for years. She kept sending us messages in response to our stories, commented, had suggestions, asked if we could connect her with the author of a piece about autism (and it worked!), and even wrote a guest post for us. Then, during Advent in 2023, this mom of three wrote to us:

“Hi Lisa, I thought for a long time about whether to even write to you again… I lost my daughter 4 weeks ago… and I'm dreading Advent and Christmas… But your idea is beautiful, it could be something for her siblings, too. Otherwise I make the Advent calendar for all the kids myself every year. But this year everything is different… Thank you so much for your idea, Annika”.

Those were her words after I had recorded a video with an idea for an Advent calendar: just write 24 little slips of paper saying what you love or admire about a person. I asked briefly if she wanted to talk about what had happened. She said she couldn't talk about it yet, but she sent along a GoFundMe link from Hannah's coworkers in emergency medical services.

“Hannah, You Were Special”

“Hannah, you were special,” the page reads. “Your laugh was contagious, and we all caught it. With us, you discovered how much you wanted to help other people in their darkest hours, and you chose emergency medical services. (…) We miss you more than words can say. You leave behind an emptiness that can never be filled. You are #einevonuns (“one of us”), and that's how we'll remember you, and we'll think of your laugh whenever the walls start closing in on us.”

Annika's daughter Hannah, her firstborn, was 21 when a coworker from the ambulance service stabbed her to death at a party. He had shown interest in her, and she had turned him down.

You probably all know that feeling of: That only happens to other people. But this time it was different. Annika had been in touch with us again and again about her three kids. I had just finished my grief counselor training, and we began writing more. I also sent her the link to our piece about Katy, who lost her sister Larissa to a violent crime.

At some point we talked on the phone. This past January we met after a nerve-racking drive on black ice to her hometown, where I was reading from my book “Und plötzlich ist nichts mehr wie es war” (“And Suddenly Nothing Is the Way It Was”) and she opened by telling the audience what had happened to her own family. About Hannah. About the trial. About going on living. However that works.

As mentioned above, she has now recorded a podcast with Katy and spoken publicly in detail about what happened to her for the first time. For a long time she couldn't imagine doing that, and now she felt ready. And here, too, she's telling for the first time about what her family had to go through, and is still going through. We talked on the phone for a long time, and this is her story:

The Murder of Our Daughter Hannah

It must have been a little before or a little after 6:30 when Annika was pulled out of sleep by the doorbell. Through the glass door she saw four people: two police officers and two crisis chaplains.

Instead of opening the front door, she ran straight to her son's room to check that he was okay. He was lying there, sound asleep. Relieved, Annika went to the door, opened it, and said something along the lines of: “You've got the wrong house, you've made a mistake, our son is fine.”

Hannah was Annika's first child. A son and another daughter came after her. Her firstborn made her a mom. Hannah was a daughter, a big sister, a niece, a cousin, a granddaughter. She was empathetic, kind, helpful, and almost always cheerful. She wasn't a center-of-attention kind of person. She was more introverted by nature, someone who watched from the edges. And she was a real bookworm who could disappear into books. How many trips her parents made to the library, for her and with her!

She also loved hairstyles. She was good with her own hair, but she liked styling her little sister's, too. Hannah was a real role model for her siblings. She was never a follower. If ten people went right, she went left. On a family vacation in Italy, in tropical heat, she liked to wear socks and long sleeves. It's hot, but it looks good. You could have called her stubborn or hardheaded if she hadn't been so charming about it. If she didn't want to do something, she didn't do it.

There was a birthday party once, early in elementary school, when she didn't want to invite a friend because the two of them weren't really speaking at the moment. Annika talked her into putting the girl on the guest list anyway, out of politeness. After all, that girl had invited Hannah to hers. And then Hannah ignored the girl for the entire party.

Lesson learned for Annika! Her kids decide, and she doesn't get involved in stuff like that anymore. Only once did she put her foot down again, in 2020, for Hannah's 18th birthday. Hannah hadn't really wanted to celebrate, but her mom Annika insisted.

Come on, you have such lovely friends… and yes, it's the Covid era, but 15 people are officially allowed to get together again now. We have to celebrate that our first child is becoming an adult! It turned out to be the best party of her life. Impossible to top. An evening the whole family still draws so much from today.

Today. When everything is different.

“We're not here about your son. May we come in?” the officer asked, gently steering Annika into her own home. The chaplains followed. It was still dark; the clocks had been turned back to standard time overnight. Annika had been woken by the doorbell. At first she'd thought someone had forgotten their key again.

Annika was standing. Her husband had sat down, also awake from the commotion. “Do you have a daughter named Hannah? I'm so sorry to tell you this: She has died.” Annika's husband buried his head in his hands, and she ran to the bedroom to get her phone. She dialed Hannah's number. Voicemail picked up. Please call me back.

Flashback to the night before. Friday. Hannah had gone to a club with friends, and at 5 a.m. Saturday morning, Annika's phone had rung. “Mom, can you pick us up?” “Send me your location, I'll come get you!” Annika had said into the phone. She threw something on and got in the car. She had no idea that this drive would become one of her greatest sources of strength in the years to come.

Two tipsy young ladies climbed into Annika's car, Hannah and her friend. Hannah beamed at Annika, so happy in that moment. “Mommy, I'm sorry. You told me to call if we couldn't get home, and this is the first time we're taking you up on it.” Mother and daughter hugged and squeezed each other.

Then Hannah started talking on the phone with another friend. And the conversation was so funny that Annika nearly ended up in a ditch. From laughing! Hannah kept repeating the friend's questions out loud so her mom could hear everything. Hannah, stop, stop it, if you want to get home in one piece, I can't take it… Annika gasped. The girls went to bed after that. And Annika went to work, since she had a weekend shift. So she didn't see Hannah again until evening.

Hannah wanted to study medicine, and at that time she was working as an EMT. She'd been invited that evening to a coworker's birthday party. Annika was in the bathroom when Hannah came to say goodbye. She had just gotten out of the shower when there was a knock at the door. Come in.

Hannah had two bottles in her hand. Annika remembers that so precisely because she would pull up that last scene with her daughter in her memory thousands upon thousands of times. One of the bottles was pink. Hannah said goodbye and gave her mom a kiss on the cheek. Don't go overboard, okay?

Annika went to sleep and stayed that way until the officers rang her doorbell that morning. During the night, Hannah had posted photos of the party to her story. It looked like fun. Now Annika was frantically trying to reach her daughter from the bedroom. A crisis chaplain had followed her and asked what she was doing. Reaching Hannah.

What happened? Annika only asks once she's back in the kitchen. An accident? “Your daughter was the victim of a violent crime.” Was it so-and-so? “No, it wasn't that person. The perpetrator has been caught and is in custody. It was a coworker.” I want to be with my child. “I'm sorry, that's not possible. Your daughter is already on her way to the medical examiner's office, where an autopsy will be performed.”

Annika doesn't know when she cried for the first time. She remembers that the police stayed quite a long time. That they spoke with the detectives on the phone several times so that as many of the family's questions as possible could be answered. By then Hannah's siblings knew, too. Her son had woken up when she came storming in to find him, and she had gone upstairs to her second daughter and sat down on the edge of the bed. What's going on?

It's about Hannah. Come downstairs with me. Annika had no words, couldn't say what was unspeakable. Her daughter screamed: “Don't you tell me Hannah is dead!”

Hannah is dead. Hannah, who only ever wanted to help other people.

In her memory, Annika reacted quietly, not screaming. She wanted her church's pastor to come, whom she liked and trusted. A friend who is a crisis chaplain, and who had gotten the alert on her phone, joined her half an hour after the police. Annika's sisters came by over the course of the morning, too. Some people recall that at some point Annika did scream and throw things across the kitchen. She herself remembers nothing of it. As if on autopilot, she told friends so they wouldn't have to learn it from the newspaper.

A few days later, the family was allowed to see Hannah once more. The funeral director had kept them informed of every step. The funeral was huge. Somehow comforting, too. Annika had told Hannah's coworkers that she'd love it if an ambulance could be there. With its lights on.

Annika carried the urn herself, to lay her girl to rest with her own hands. They had called it a celebration of life. The last party. When the doors of the chapel opened, there wasn't just an ambulance with its lights flashing. All of Hannah's coworkers from emergency services had come. They formed an honor guard almost all the way down to the grave. At least 200 people. Many chaplains were also there.

All my emotions go to Hannah, Annika had vowed when the trial of the perpetrator took place. She didn't want to give him a scrap of her feelings. You don't get my hate. Her husband, her son, her second daughter, and she would all go into the courtroom together. With their attorney and a trial support counselor. The perpetrator got 13 years. The murder weapon has never been found to this day. They had read all the case files beforehand. They endured it together. Together for Hannah.

The biggest hole so far opened up about six months after the trial ended. The biggest challenge: everyday life. In the months before, Annika had mostly functioned. There had always been files to read or something to organize.

Now she had trouble being in the kitchen. Most of her family life had happened there. And it was also where she'd been told the thing that split her life forever into a before and an after.

She couldn't cook, because Hannah had loved cooking so much. She, who had always put so much value on hygiene and cleanliness, couldn't clean at home anymore, while at work she did it excessively. Work, in general. It became her biggest anchor and her best distraction.

At some point her therapist floated the idea that maybe it was hard for her to erase traces. Hannah's last traces. How many times had Annika stared at the tiles in the bathroom, the ones she'd been looking at when Hannah said goodbye to her for the last time.

A goodbye for good.

A goodbye from a young woman who always wanted to help.

From someone who will never be forgotten.