The first time Katy Uhl walked out of a meeting with the Parents of Murdered Children support group, she was certain she would never go back.
Her son, Evan Wissing, was killed in Lakewood just a month or so before, and Uhl was lost. She stepped into the gathering of other grief-stricken parents feeling ambivalent, hesitant to open up, but desperate for help. She spoke at that first meeting, cried the whole time, and, afterward, the other parents hugged her. She walked out completely drained.
“I thought, ‘Never again, never again, never again,’” Uhl said.
But then she did go back. And she found a support that was unlike any other.
“What I saw were people who had survived it,” she said. “And at that time, I didn’t know how I was going to survive it. I was scared. It gave me hope to see these people who were functioning and moving on with their lives.”
Casandra Watkins was contemplating suicide before she found Parents of Murdered Children. On that particularly hard day after her son was killed, she called the phone numbers for the group’s organizers, going down a list of four. The third person answered her call.
“For the first time, I felt someone spoke my language,” Watkins said. “Someone understood me, got me, and I was not alone.”
Watkins and Uhl met through Parents of Murdered Children and attended a handful of monthly meetings before the local group — run by the same man for more than a decade — closed its doors in December 2022. The shuttered group was the only chapter in Colorado; the national organization, founded in 1978, has chapters in 23 states.
The two mothers managed on their own for a while, then both Uhl and Watkins separately reached out to the national organization about restarting Denver’s chapter.
They reconnected and together, over the last year, they’ve reforged the local group. They now hope Denver Parents of Murdered Children will bring the same kind of support they received to other parents.
“I’m not an attorney, I’m not a psychologist, I’m not an expert in anything,” Uhl said. “But what I can do is open a door once a month and give people some place to go.”
A stranger’s dispute
When Evan Wissing was a boy of 10 or maybe 12, the family stayed in a California vacation rental that Uhl thought was on the beach but was actually across a highway, connected to the beach by a high walking bridge. At the start of their trip, Uhl, who is afraid of heights, tried and failed to cross the bridge. Her knees buckled.
The next day, Wissing woke his mother up and vowed to get her across the bridge.
“I thought, ‘Oh (expletive),’” Uhl said. She tried to explain to him that she couldn’t do it. But he insisted, and she finally agreed to try. When they reached the bridge, Wissing told her to close her eyes. She squeezed them shut.
“He took my hand and he walked me across the bridge,” Uhl said. “It was just so Evan that he was not going to let that go. He was going to make that right for me. And he was always very much like that in taking care of people. And sometimes, not using the best judgment as an adult.”
Wissing grew into a man who loved riding motorcycles, skiing, snowboarding, hiking and camping. He was empathetic and kind — he once drove to a Denver bus station to buy a stranger a ticket after seeing her post on social media that she was stranded there with no way home.
In the final years of his life, he struggled with drug addiction. He never stole from Uhl, but he would steal from big box stores, then return the stolen items at other locations for cash to buy drugs.
He went to rehab twice and lived for a while with Uhl. He relapsed more than once, and, finally, in May 2022, she kicked him out. She thought if life was hard for him, if he didn’t have her home to stay in or her food to eat, he would stop using.
He was homeless when he was killed, and Uhl still feels guilty for that.
Wissing, 31, was killed in July 2022 at a Home Depot on West Colfax Avenue. He was trying to intervene in a dispute outside the building when the man involved in the dispute turned on him. Witnesses told police they saw Wissing back away with his hands wide, palms up. After putting some distance between them, Wissing turned away from the angry man.
The man picked up a rock and smashed it into the back of Wissing’s head. He fell instantly.
A sergeant from the Lakewood Police Department called Uhl a little after midnight. Her son was brain dead, but on life support, machines alone keeping his heart beating, the blood running through his veins. There was no chance of recovery. Uhl decided to turn off the machines just after 4:30 a.m.
Within 30 seconds, everything stopped.
Every second Saturday
On the second Saturday in November, Watkins and Uhl logged into Zoom for the regular meeting of Denver’s Parents of Murdered Children.
The group met in person for a while after they restarted in December 2024, but they lost access to that space and moved online instead for virtual meetings. On this night, a handful of other users logged in, some with their cameras turned on and others without. Watkins kicked off the meeting with a slideshow of local victims’ photos set to music before opening up the floor for sharing and discussion.
After a while, a man whose son was shot to death in July spoke up. His son’s murder was the hardest thing he’s ever endured. And he hoped his question wasn’t rude, but he had to ask it.
“How do I learn to live my life with this?” he asked. The Denver Post agreed not to name the group’s participants to protect their privacy and allow them to speak freely.
Watkins answered first, urging the man to find something to hang on to. When her 19-year-old son, Kanajai Burton, was shot and killed in Denver in 2022, she knew she had to be there to raise his baby son, her grandson.
“None of us can answer that for you,” she said. “Everyone is different. There is no book. There’s nothing to tell us how to do it. We just do it. And we take it day by day, sometimes minute by minute.”
“It’s just, I can’t (expletive) function,” the man said, his voice tight with grief. “I’m not the same person anymore.”
A woman in the group, whose daughter was killed several years ago, offered that she sets a timer — allowing herself a limited window in which to give in to the grief. When the timer goes off, she turns her thoughts to positive memories and the day ahead.
Uhl weighed in, too.
“Especially in the beginning, you don’t think clearly, you don’t function well, you can’t plan, you can’t organize,” Uhl said. “It is such a shock to your system… When I think back on it, I don’t know how I made it through those first six months. But I did. And you will, too. You will slowly figure out how to live with this loss. Your life will not be the same and it won’t go away, but it will get easier to breathe.”
By 9 p.m., the man felt less alone. He thanked the group, bonded by the particular horribleness of homicide, for listening.
“We are your support, and we get it, we understand how the world just does not get us at all,” Watkins said.
When Wissing first died, Uhl for months struggled to sleep, instead replaying the moment they shut off the life support machines over and over again in her mind.
“And at some point I thought, this is going to eat me alive,” she said.
She forced herself to replace that memory with a different one: her son as a toddler, dressed in his little red pants and white turtleneck, his beloved blankie in tow.
When she remembered the way it felt to pull him in close, she fell asleep a little bit easier.
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