Looking down at her 1-year-old granddaughter, Indy Rice said she dreads the day the little girl asks how her mother died.
“When she asks, we’ll sit her down and tell her,” Rice said. “She deserves to know the truth.”
Rice is the mother of Daytona Hudgins, the 19-year-old woman who was found dead July 19 in a transient camp behind a cellphone repair store on Fort Vancouver Way. The Clark County Medical Examiner’s Office announced Tuesday that Hudgins died of strangulation and ruled her death a homicide.
A few years ago, Hudgins started running away from home. At some point, she began using methamphetamine, Rice said.
From years of witnessing her daughter’s downward spiral, Rice said she had been emotionally preparing herself for the potential that her daughter might die of a drug overdose.
“I’ve had to swallow that,” Rice said.
But when Rice learned that her teenage daughter died by being strangled, she said her whole world changed.
“Her last moments … I cannot imagine what she went through,” she said. “She’s not even 100 pounds. She wasn’t a fighter. She never fought a day in her life.”
Daytona Hudgins’ story starts in Safford, Ariz., where she grew up with her family. Hudgins was a creative little girl, Rice said, who liked drawing and writing poems and even taught herself how to play the piano. In June 2011, Rice and her husband moved Hudgins and their two sons to Vancouver for a work opportunity and to escape the prevalent drug use in the small Arizona town.
Once in Vancouver, however, Hudgins ended up finding drugs anyway.
Hudgins met a transient man from Portland, and the two ran away, Rice said. They made their way to California, Arizona and Louisiana, where her boyfriend has family. Eventually, Hudgins got pregnant with her daughter, Tessa May Madison.
In the middle of 2013, Hudgins broke up with her boyfriend and moved back to Vancouver to live permanently with her daughter. Rice said she opened her house to them.
One day in June of this year, however, Hudgins said she was going to get cigarettes. She never returned.
“She really wasn’t homeless; we were right here,” Rice said. “She was lost.”
On top of using drugs, Rice said, she thinks her daughter suffered from postpartum depression.
“Now I guess we’ll never know,” she said.
Vancouver police have not arrested anyone in connection with Hudgins’ death, but major crimes detectives are continuing their investigation into the slaying.
Rice said she wants to see whoever is responsible for her daughter’s death behind bars.
“I’ll never be able to fix things with her. She’s not going to get to hold her daughter; somebody took that from her,” Rice said. “Nobody should take anybody’s life and get away with it.”
Rice has not yet held a memorial service for Hudgins because of a lack of money. People wishing to donate to a memorial fund for Daytona Hudgins can do so at www.gofundme.com/bv64so.
