Holding Tight to Life In the Shadow of Death

A Murder-Suicide Took Betty Appiah's Parents, but Not Her Hope

"I know [my parents are] there with me, watching and just being happy for me. Even though I can't see them, I can feel their presence. I know they'll be proud that they've really helped me grow up and be somebody," said Hayfield senior Betty Appiah. (Marvin Joseph - The Post)

Tonight at Hayfield Secondary School, the girls' basketball team's three seniors will be honored before their final home game. Two will stroll onto the court with their parents, clutching bouquets as the crowd gives them a warm ovation.

The third senior, Betty Appiah, will take those same steps, accompanied by an aunt and uncle and younger sisters Renee and Jessica. She will carry flowers, but also a grievous burden.

On the afternoon of Nov. 13, the first day of basketball tryouts, Appiah returned home from school to find her mother dead on her parents' bedroom floor at the family's townhouse on Sky Blue Court in the Kingstowne section of Fairfax County.

Before the shattered glass, dried blood and limp body could fully register, Appiah thought the bullets on the floor were jewelry. Her father's taxi was parked outside and his keys were in the house, but he was nowhere to be found. Frantic calls to his cellphone went straight to voicemail.

"Where could this man have gone?" Appiah recalled asking herself.

Investigators later that day discovered her father in a bathroom off that same bedroom, also dead of a gunshot wound.

Authorities determined that Samuel Appiah-Kusi, 54, had murdered his wife, Monica O. Telfer, 44, and then killed himself. The homicide-suicide shocked the Hayfield girls' basketball team and forced Betty Appiah, then 17, to help guide her sisters through the deaths of their parents.

"We show up on November 13 for basketball tryouts thinking about wins and losses," Hayfield assistant coach Frank Walsh said, "and then very quickly it becomes about life and loss."

Tenth-grader Renee, who played junior varsity basketball at Hayfield, and sixth-grader Jessica have since moved in with an aunt and uncle in the District; Betty has split time with those relatives and friends of the family who live near Hayfield, where she will finish high school.

It is where tonight, she, like the other two Hayfield seniors, will reflect on her career on Senior Night in a testimonial, sure to touch on her parents' deaths, that will be read by the public address announcer.

"I would always ask, 'Why, why, why?' But there's no point in time where I ever held a grudge between both parents," said Betty, who speaks in an easy, musical cadence that offers a hint of her parents' native Ghana. She still often refers to her "Mommy" and "Daddy" in present tense.

"It's supposed to be a sad moment, but for me, I'm not really sad because they were two good people," she said. "They helped us to grow up to be how we are and set a good example for us to go pick up the pieces. . . . This has not brought me down or anything. This has really helped me to see how life is out there."