When her dad shot and killed her mom, it left Jennessy Andrew and her younger teenage siblings without the parents they still needed to guide them through life. Yet in the years since that act of violence, they've managed to keep their father close in their hearts by living their mom's life lessons.
"My parents taught me forgiveness. My mom never held grudges," Andrew said.
With that sentiment guiding the way, Andrew will find herself tending to the needs of her family this Thanksgiving with a day of company and a large meal. But from her hometown of Bethel, population 6,300, on the northwestern edge of America, she will cook up more than a turkey and ham with all the trimmings. In this home, faith and forgiveness are at the heart of the celebration.
At 28, Andrew is living a life she wouldn't have imagined eight years ago as a young woman about to begin life on her own. But death has a strange way of changing and strengthening one's course.
Ballasia Andrew was shot to death in 2005. Remarkably, it is her killer who will lead the family in its Thanksgiving prayer. Andrew's father, Tommy Andrew, doesn't remember pulling the trigger. Like the mom he took from his kids, Tommy Andrew is unable to physically be at the dinner table. But he will be there, connecting by phone from jail, where he is serving time for his wife's death in the aftermath of one final, alcohol-fueled fight between the couple that started life together as high school sweethearts.
"You never would have thought this would have happened to us," Jennessy Andrew said earlier this week from her office in Bethel, where she works as an accountant. "It can happen to any family."
In the eight years since the death, she's strengthened her relationship with her father and found ways to include him in the everyday lives of the family members.
Her mom and dad were the cooks of the family. Mostly, it was her mom, but her dad had his own signature dishes. When Andrew moved away to Anchorage to go to college, she'd often call her mom for cooking tips. To this day, she can't make bread the way her mom did. But she's excelled at stronger life lessons, some that might arguably be even more difficult.
"Our family didn't hate him or want to keep him in jail forever," Ballasia's sister, Agnes, explained. In this family, resilience was going to prevail. "You have no choice. How are you going to go through an experience like that? You either make it worse, or learn from it and go forward."
For Jennessy, going forward means more than just accepting her father into her life. It also means breaking the heart-heavy silence in which domestic violence thrives.
A terrible blackout
On what should have been a lazy Sunday in late spring of 2005, Andrew got an early morning phone call she almost missed. She'd just graduated from college four days earlier with an associate degree in business, and was nine months pregnant, expecting her baby's birth in less than two weeks. She probably would have ignored the call if it had been from someone she knew. But when the caller ID came up as "unknown," she thought she'd better pick up. She did, and on the other end the voice of her 16-year-old sister delivered piercing words.
"She just said that my dad had shot my mom," Andrew said.
Ballasia died less than an hour later.
Andrew's mom and dad had been experiencing escalating marital trouble. Both were drinkers, and in the months leading up the killing, Ballasia had begun the process of leaving.
"Where's my wife, and when is she coming to pick me up?" Tommy Andrew asked his niece, the first visitor to see him in jail that morning. He had no recollection of firing multiple shots around 8 o'clock that morning as their 16-year-old daughter watched helplessly. When he came out of the blackout and learned what he'd done, he cried and cried and cried.
One year to the day after the killing, Tommy Andrew was sentenced to 40 years in jail for his wife's murder.
It would be another two weeks before Jennessy would have a chance to see her dad, through a glass window that separates defendants from visitors. She told him she loved him. He told her he was sorry.
She wanted to know, What do you remember? How do you feel? Silence filled the space. There was nothing to say. The moment that had changed their lives forever was blank.
"He doesn't remember. He woke up the next day thinking mom would bail him out and pick him up," Andrew said.
The daughter becomes a mom
The shooting came just four days after Andrew, then 20 years old, had graduated from her college program. Nine months pregnant and living 400 miles away in Anchorage, she now found herself the young matriarch of a family that would require inordinate strength to get through the tough times ahead. Within a span of two weeks, she would bury her mom, give birth to the family's first grandchild, and bring her sister and 13-year-old brother to Anchorage to live.
If she was angry with her father, it was about the hardship she suddenly faced. Squeezing a boyfriend, newborn, and two teenagers into a one bedroom apartment wasn't easy. Resentment creeped in. She'd find herself thinking "I can't do this. This is too hard for me. Why did this have to happen to me. Why did my dad do this?"
By summer's end, she'd move the family back to the family home in Bethel, the same place where the shooting occurred, and try to find normalcy in their shattered world. She made sure that her sister and brother graduated from high school. More grandbabies came. In prison, her father found God, took classes, and joined the church.
"I sincerely believe he has changed," Andrew said of her father, with whom she maintains routine contact as an integral part of the family's life. They trade photos and make phone calls, and when opportunity allows they go visit him in person.
The family's early years
Tommy and Ballasia fell in love at Mount Edgecumbe boarding school in Sitka. The upriver girl from Sleetmute and the downriver boy from Tuntutuliak saw something special in each other. They married in 1983, shortly after graduation.
He joined the Alaska National Guard and went on to make it a 20-year career. She raised the family and looked out for her neighbors. Ballasia always had a soft spot for others. She didn't have much growing up. If anyone had a need, she would do what she could to fill it. Whether it was food for your stomach, diapers for your baby, or clothing for your back, Ballasia could be counted on to deliver.
Together, the couple instilled determination in their children. They shared chores. He knew how to cook. She knew how to check the oil in a car. And perhaps most of all, Ballasia was a "don't go to bed angry" kind of mom. She valued forgiveness and moving on.
As the family got older, alcohol began to take a greater hold on their lives. They both drank, and their whiskey-laden fights would get heated. They yelled. They shoved. Always at each other, never at the kids. But the kids saw. The kids knew. Sometimes cops were called because the fights got so loud. Sometimes, the Office of Children's Services would check on them. But always, things just seemed to resolve.
"I don't think anything was ever taken seriously," Andrew said. "We were very protective of our parents. We didn't take action. We didn't speak out."
When people would check on the family, Andrew said she and her siblings kept quiet, hoping their parents would get through it. "It's just one day. They'll be better tomorrow," she recalls thinking to herself more than once.
Andrew isn't certain why the couple couldn't make things work, but she believes her father's absences for work training created tension at home. Accusations and suspicions grew. In that final year before the shooting, they'd talked about separating. With her sister's help, Ballasia was taking the steps necessary to leave her husband, who had always been the provider, the one who looked after her and the children.
"'Where do I begin? How do I do this,'" Agnes Gregory remembers her sister asking her. "The way they were drinking, I knew sooner or later something would happen because it was not getting any better."
Her niece, Jennessy, also believes the couple's looming separation may have been what caused her father to snap that night, to pick up a gun and shoot her mother.
In the months before the killing, Ballasia had sought and received alcohol treatment oustide of Alaska. Tommy tried to get treatment in the family's hometown, but was told there wasn't space.
"It was in the back of our minds. If they had reached out and had space available for him, he could have gotten help. But it was already too late," Andrew said.
A path forward
These days, Tommy Andrew watches over his children from jail. And as of this fall, he's closer to home. He had been housed out of state at facilities in Arizona and Colorado. But in September he was moved to the Wildwood Correctional Facility in Kenai. The family hopes to be able to visit with him more often now.
Despite the distance that separates them, they've maintained their relationship through letters and phone calls. From his jail cell, he still manages to dole out fatherly advice: lots of love, encouragement and thankfulness.
Jennessy maintains the four-bedroom family home, where she lives with her husband, two children, and her siblings and their families. On Thanksgiving, it will fill even further with aunts and uncles.
They'll feast on turkey, ham, sweet potato casserole, stuffing, cranberry sauce, corn and twice-baked potatoes, and wait for the phone to ring. When it does, they'll put her father on speaker phone to deliver the family prayer, as he has reliably done every birthday and holiday year after year. Tommy Andrew will pray, thank the family for everything they have done, everything they have come through, and then pray for their future.
"I think she would be proud of him. I know she would have forgiven him for what he's done," Andrew said of her mom.
At the time of her death, Ballasia Andrew was ecstatically looking forward to the birth of Jennessy's child, an expected grandson. But the family thinks "Balla," as she was known, might not have missed out as much as they thought.
When Jennessy delivered her child on June 9, it wasn't a boy who entered the world, as two ultrasounds had confirmed, but a girl. EmmaMae Balla was named for every grandmother in the family, born just two days after "Balla" was laid to rest.
She'll grow up knowing her grandmother through stories. And it is in the dark story of how Balla left this world that her daughter hopes another family in pain might find healing and hope.
"All of this happened behind closed doors," she said. "I saw the red flags but I chose not to act upon them."
Domestic violence thrives in silence. By telling her story, Jennessy has found power in words, and begun a legacy of healing. And she's hopeful through her experience, others will have the courage to speak up, to tell someone, if violence affects their home.
She is thankful her father is in her life, thankful for the lessons her parents instilled in her, and thankful she and her brother and sister are on a different path.
"I knew that I would never be in a domestic violence relationship. By showing my brother and sister that it doesn't have to happen with this generation, we can be the breaking point to stop it for the next generation."
Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com