Evelyn Palattella Henderson’s Victim Impact Statement

2023-27-June

At the time of this writing, it has been almost 2027 days since my first fire. No, strike that – arson. I despise that last word maybe because the a-word –  unlike its flexible distant cousin – fire – is unapologetic in its lack of possibilities. 

 So please, humor me and consider this following sentence either practice or cheap therapy. At the time of this writing, it has been 2027 days since my first arson. I’m sure you’ve picked up on how the possessive pronoun and qualifier imply there has been more than one. 

Today I stood a few feet from the man responsible for those multiple arsons; here is what I said…

Judge Bernhardt, thank you for the opportunity to offer my Victim Impact Statement. I hope these pages, which have benefitted from some four journals I have kept since December 2017, aim to do what an alphanumeric account cannot: to transmit the experience of being on the receiving end of unimaginable torment by recounting my actions, perceptions, memories, and emotions over these past five and a half years.

Even with my personal notes to guide me, attempting to communicate what it has been like to live through two arsons in under one year – the first in December 2017 and the second in September 2018 – while attempting to keep my business and children afloat while also endeavoring to comprehend the mindset of the man who poured the gasoline and lit the matches… Your Honor, this has been like the work of Sisyphus, the mythological figure burdened with the task of perpetually rolling a boulder up a hill. Still, I am grateful to the court and you, Judge Bernhardt, for allowing me to try to wrestle with the heavy impediments of my own life.

©evelynhenderson — Notebooks Evelyn Henderson kept from December 2017 (the time of her first house fire) until 2023, when her arsonist, David Crawford from Ellicott City, Maryland, was sentenced t 8 life sentences (several concurrent) plus 75 years for his crimes.

It’s difficult to remember there was a version of me who could confidently ride a bike or drive a car in heavy traffic. It’s also difficult to admit that I can no longer drive a car. It’s difficult for me to do other things, like concentrate, sleep through the night, and be without my husband, Scott. But being unable to get myself where I want to go makes me feel like a failure. I’m no neurologist, so I’ll do my best to explain. I’ve learned by working with a therapist that I have PTSD due to prolonged and repeated trauma. I have been overly sensitive and trigger quickly ever since having my home destroyed by fire twice. It’s hard for me to separate safe events happening in the present from dangerous events that occurred in the past. I get mixed up, and I often feel like the bad stuff that has happened is about to or will happen again at any moment. This feeling makes me incredibly uncomfortable and anxious, setting off a worry loop.

What this means is that in the two thousand or so days since my first fire—or better yet, since David Crawford decided to burn down my family home twice in one year—and at the time of this telling, to varying degrees, I’ve felt continually under attack or on the brink of crisis. I’ve vacillated between being overstimulated and exhausted. In a misguided attempt to feel better, I’ll often ruminate and fixate on what makes me scared. I’ll check on my incredibly patient and now adult children incessantly. The slightest cough or bump has me doom scrolling on WebMD or calling my doctor. I expect the worst because I know life can change overnight. After all, mine has. And though I don’t particularly like talking about the inner workings of my trauma, I am grateful to still have the presence of mind, despite the propensity of my own to misfire, to feel like I am a little less of a loser when my therapist says my inability to operate a vehicle is a “perfectly normal trauma response.” As if there’s something normal about the words normal and trauma complementing each other in a sentence.

December 9, 2017, arson, set by David Crawford on the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive in Ellicott City, Maryland. David Crawford lived a one-half mile from this home. Source: Howard County Police department

Yes, it’s difficult to remember there was a replica-me who could sleep through the night, trust neighbors, and make and keep lots of friends. A woman who believed without hesitation that she could fix broken people and systems by simply volunteering her time. I was a woman whose house–decorated with holiday garland and twinkle lights, with my girls’ Christmas presents hidden under its basement stairs, and a pile of donated coats and hats for those who had none piled atop my blue racing bike –was set ablaze between 3:00 and 4:00 am while Scott, our youngest daughter Quinn, our dog Scooby, and I slept inside. That was me before I had yet to put my heart and soul into painstakingly redesigning and rebuilding that same home. My family and I would flex every creative muscle, pinch every penny, and borrow a few more to try reconstructing a better version of our home and maybe ourselves. That was a woman who had yet to feel what it’s like to live a nightmare on repeat.

First responders at the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive in Ellicott City, Maryland, on September 22, 2018. The second set fire at the address in less than 12 months. Image Source: Howard County Police Department.

To witness all that she had built back up from ashes become engulfed in flames again while hearing a firefighter within earshot blurt out with the misguided enthusiasm of an eight-year-old boy that he “was here for the first fire too!” That was before I had wrapped my head around the depths of David Crawford’s heartlessness and hit list. A list he kept hidden, so he could keep track of an imaginary score he was intent on settling with the aid of his three best friends: heat, fuel, and oxygen. That Evelyn, the woman on that list, was a person who had yet to fully comprehend who David Crawford really was. Still, she had never bought the persona David Crawford was selling.

SOURCE:www.facebook.com/kimoldhamforstatesattorney/photos Dave Crawford’s wife, Mary, a former Prince George’s County, Maryland State’s attorney, is last, far right. This Image was taken 18 days after he set the Henderson family home on fire for the second time.

That he was a folksy retired police chief who had enjoyed a great career in law enforcement. That he loved people. That everybody counted, or nobody counted. Though admitting this now seems like a dubious accomplishment, I always thought of David Crawford as a living, breathing human trope. I never saw a man work so hard at being a cliche. But now I know why. David Crawford played the part of the golly gee, awe-shucks neighbor and retired cop while telling anyone who would listen or read one of his exhaustive social media posts what they wanted to hear, so he could continue to do what David Crawford loves best: to hurt people.

SOURCE: Facebook: Screengrab of David Crawford left at a public book signing at Carroll County Community College on 10/22/2019 07:00 PM — 09:00 PM with Michael Connelly supporting his novel The Night Fire

Having lived through two devastating fires in under one year, I can tell you that no amount of preparation can prepare you for the kind of chaos that fire brings. Flames are indiscriminate. They take what they want and leave what you don’t. And the totems that remind you who you were, who you are, and who you hope to be: these vanish. A Polaroid picture of a tow-headed baby under an Ocean City sun. Gone. A storybook, its order and cadence of one-syllable words, long since memorized, obligatory reading after baths and bad dreams. Gone. A bin of mismatched barrettes. Gone. Bright bits of candy-colored plastic I once used to pin back precious, cornsilk soft wisps of baby curls. Gone. I don’t miss my couches and coffee tables, silverware, or steak knives. I don’t miss my dining room table and chairs, dishes, mattresses, cameras, carpets, or that house that we rebuilt on the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive, though its shiny new kitchen did have the most incredible floating shelves. Still, I anguish over Christmas ornaments and chambray shirts, one threadbare shirt peppered with crewel flowers, sunny yellow, and watermelon pink. Worn on repeat by me, with a smile. I mourn for the tiny hospital-issued pink and blue-striped cotton knit caps and blankets, the first things that touched my newborn babies’ skin besides my own, with a depth of grieving that shocks even me.

©evelynhenderson — Interior fire damage to Henderson family home on the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive in Ellicott City, Maryland, after December 2017 arson set by her neighbor and the former police chief David Michael Crawford

Our brokenness was not readily apparent until after the second fire, perhaps because our minds and bodies had been busy. My family–Mevie, Quinn, Scott, and maybe even our dog Scooby–maneuvered around the landmines left behind by the first fire like any good platoon post-combat. We were trying to be resilient soldiers, shell-shocked but still assessing damage while awaiting marching orders. We could do this because we had buckets of hope. That hope combusted into the ether when our lives were torched again around 3:30 in the morning on September 22, 2018. Everything shifted after that. The accidental became deliberate, and my kids’ questions turned from the childlike “Mom, will we be, okay?” to the decidedly adult “Mom, is someone out to get us?” I didn’t answer at first. But when the dogs trained to sniff out accelerants did just that while visiting the hole in the ground, which once was my old new house on the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive, I had no choice but to acknowledge the sea change. The four of us silently yet knowingly stopped believing in the narrative I’d been hocking, the storyline that promised “Trust me, tomorrow will be better.” Tomorrow had arrived, and it was the stuff of nightmares. Still, I knew we weren’t dreaming. I wondered if my four-person family was inside a simulation where some faceless, iniquitous force was pulling the strings, calling the shots. These intrusive thoughts sounded so over-the-top and extraordinary that my internal monologue wouldn’t allow them. I’d counter, telling myself my creative brain was getting the best of me. But I knew Scott, the girls, and I were marked, a people set apart and exiled to a parallel universe where we didn’t know the rules but still, somehow, knew they had changed.

©evelynhenderson — Interior image of Henderson home of post-construction due to fire damage

Howard County and Maryland-based Fire Marshalls inspect post-fire destruction located on the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive in Ellicott City on September 22, 2018, Image Source: Howard County Police Department.

And because the rules had changed, I changed. Overnight, I divested from perfection—designing a flawless home—and invested in protection: I will keep my family safe at all costs. That looked something like the following. Me sleeping at the foot of the front door atop a blow-up mattress inside a rented house, with a kitchen knife, also rented, within arm’s length. Just in case the nameless person apparently out to get us found us. Me spending my insomnia-fueled wakefulness by using a computer that still smelled like smoke to submit crime reports to online personal data brokers in a futile effort to get my telephone number and address scrubbed from websites like whitepages.com. Me watching as an exorcist equipped with holy water and salt sealed off room after room of my new home from the powers of the devil. Me telling myself that in time my friends and extended family would understand why I wouldn’t give them the address to that same home or invite them over. I told myself the people I loved would get over it, and I would get used to my loneliness if it meant I could keep my kids safe. It was that simple.

©evelynhenderson — SOURCE: Next Door (since removed in 2023), screengrab an image of David Crawford’s public posting on November 24, 2018, a month and a few days after he had set that same house on fire on the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive.

But I would quickly learn there is nothing simple about the life of a crime victim. Like this simple exercise, for instance, the act of delivering my Victim’s Impact Statement. It is a juggernaut of trying to share the aftermath of the unthinkable while keeping intact my dignity and, more importantly, that of my daughters. Who, by the way, are both now adults, and wholly capable of sharing their own stories. So, I will simply convey that if my then-teenage daughters hadn’t had their home destroyed by an arsonist twice, I most likely would not be able to speak intelligently about the following: PTSD, suicide ideation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, mood stabilizers, the Howard County Public School System’s Home Hospital Teaching Program, medical power of attorney or healthcare proxy, bed availability for inpatient psychiatric treatment, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy referred to as EMDR and disorders such as dissociative, major depressive, anxiety and rapid in cycling bipolar disorder. The latter, I’d learn from one of my children’s doctors, is an illness that originates from a phenomenon medical experts call kindling. As the word implies, just as easily combustible material like kindling needs a spark to catch fire, the cycling that would eventually take over the life and mind one of my kids required a catalyst. The impetus of her sickness was when the faceless monster set a match to her home, with her asleep inside, and then again, just because it could.

©evelynhenderson — Post-fire damage to the Henderson home after the December 2017 arson set by David Crawford located on the 4000 block of Spring Meadow Drive in Ellicott City, Maryland

Perhaps I was telling myself what I wanted to hear when I tried to convince myself that I could contain the collateral damage of two fires. But I was a trauma rookie then and hadn’t realized that extinguished flames, though long gone, still have a phantom hunger. The fire that obliterated my home was now intent on overpowering the last few years of both my daughters’ teendom. It succeeded and claimed two years of high school, two proms, two graduation ceremonies, the entirety of their innocence and most of their sanity. I was furious that I had become a Subject Matter Expert on mental illness. Enraged for my children. Incensed that I was also an outsider. An alien who no longer knew the language in a world full of well-meaning folks. Folks who asked me if I was cursed as I grabbed creamer at the Giant. Folks who complained that police officers had come by their house twice to ask them a few questions about our fires, and if “I could believe that!?” Folks with benign worries, worries I once had, like if our kid’s ACT or SAT scores would be good enough. If our kid would get asked to prom in some ridiculously elaborate way or get a lead in the high school musical. I was furious with the well-meaning folks. Enraged that I was no longer one of them. Still, I was even more angry with myself that I had not fully appreciated the ease and beauty of my life back when I had belonged to that world.

©evelynhenderson —Source, Facebook screengrab image.

But regardless of your lack or abundance of character traits like resiliency and emotions like anger, life doesn’t deny itself forward motion. So, I moved forward, despite knowing I was hiding my inability to do so in plain sight. I did the standard normal people stuff, happy or sad. I planted gardens, went for runs, wrote scripts, and baked cakes with a mixer I had saved from the trash heap just before my incinerated house was demolished. I watched a good friend succumb to cancer and help to bury a favorite Aunt. All the while, however, I was thinking about decidedly not normal things, like “Who was our arsonist and when would they be back?” I shouldn’t have been surprised when the nameless became known. Still, I watched myself listen to the news: the detectives had proof. The author of my family’s nightmare was a person whose house I’d walked by hundreds of times with my husband and Scooby in tow. He lived in our town; he could buy his coffee at our Dunkin, groceries at our Giant, and quite possibly his accelerant of choice at a gas station we used.

Image Source: Prince George’s County Police Department

Scott and I redoubled our safe-at-all-costs habits. We’d trade off every other night, one awake, watching from 2 am to 4:30 am, while the other told themselves they were “sleeping” just in case David Crawford, not yet in custody, had designs on burning down our house for a third time. During my shifts, true to form, I’d multi-task. I’d position my chair with a full view of the driveway, keep an eye on our security camera feed, seven cameras in total, while reading from two texts, both nonfiction: The 664-page Arsonist Profiles, which analyzed the motives and behaviors of arsonists, and People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. The day David Crawford was denied bail, and after more than two months of watching and reading during my bi-nightly surveillance shift, I wrote the following in my journal: “No matter how enlightened I become, my brain will never expand so much as to crack the code of David Crawford’s brand of evil.” Evil, which though now locked behind bars, continues to exercise power, keeping me afraid. His vice is so insipid that it persists, forcing my kids to fight their demons. Demons which I’m sure would never have come calling had not the devil himself, David Crawford, first let them in.

©evelynhenderson — The 664-page Arsonist Profiles and People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil.

I stand before you today, willing to divulge my bad dreams and broken parts, because of David Crawford. He’s a man who’s answered to too many monikers in his 71 years, among those son, brother, uncle, husband, father, and grandfather; plus, the two he liked to share ad infinitum: public servant and retired police chief. One might rightly assume that an individual called upon to answer to any of these roles, but especially the last two, understood the unspoken privilege attached to them and was likely a special kind of human, someone fair, honorable, and kind. Yet this process has yielded evidence and an outcome—a guilty verdict—which allows me to respectfully remind you, Judge Bernhardt, that despite what these many monikers might suggest, David Crawford is nothing but a duplicitous, vindictive, cruel serial arsonist and attempted murderer. A former police chief but also the author of a hit list he used to keep track of his insatiable need to inflict violence on others like the Byrne and Antico families, myself, and, by proxy, my family. It infuriates me that he saw fit to contaminate my very name in his maniacal thoroughness. And even if only documented inside some long-forgotten judiciary file cabinet or database, my name “Evelyn”—the one he jotted down on his hit list with the number “2” next to it, so he, in his bottomless insecurity, could keep track of how many times he tried to destroy me—will forever be linked to a pathetic man named David Crawford. David Crawford was many things to many people, but he is only one thing to me: a perpetrator. And the sole reason that I am now a victim.

Source: Hyattsville Police Department Facebook Page, David Crawford, young Police Officer, top row, far right.

Victim. Since becoming one, I have realized this designation somehow precludes you from engaging in small talk. So let me be clear. Judge Bernhardt, David Crawford’s brand of cruelty changed me on a cellular level: it altered the rhythm of my life and brain. It has threatened my belief systems and sense of belonging. It has forced me to hide in plain sight and, by design, isolate myself. It’s wasted my time, disturbed my sleep, and made me question my sanity. And the reverberations of his cruelness didn’t end there. The monster came for my family: my best friend and husband, Scott, our daughters Mevie and Quinn, and our sweet dog Scooby. For me, that’s unforgivable—and is why I will not be offering David Crawford my forgiveness. It is not my job to redeem him or make those who might still love him feel better about themselves or the state of his soul. The darkness he is living is his doing and undoing. His absolution is not my problem, nor is the justice I seek contingent upon it.

There’s something I’ve learned since having forced upon me a delineator that has everything to do with what has been done to me and nothing to do with me as a person.

Screengrab image from Maryland Judiciary Case Search website. Inset indicates David Crawford’s wife, Mary, refusal to testify. Source: https://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetail.jis?caseId=C13CR21000152&loc=62&detailLoc=ODYCRIM

Victims don’t get to choose.

We don’t get to choose, if or if not, our perpetrators and their crimes are vetted by a jury or judge.

I’m infinitely grateful that in David Crawford’s case a judge and jury have done that, and I stand in solidarity with his other victims still awaiting justice.

We don’t get to choose if we’d like to relive the worst days of our lives or not, just so the person responsible for those horrible days is held to account.

We don’t get to choose if the calling cards left behind by our trauma – like the photos of my home being engulfed by flames – are shared repeatably, or not, on social media.

We don’t get to choose which family members or friends care or not, about our struggles long after the violence inflicted upon us is over.

And specifically, to this moment, a moment my family and I have waited on since March 4th, 2020, the day David Crawford was held without bail: I don’t get to choose the length of David Crawford’s sentence and whether, once decided, he has access to digital devices. The same devices the State proved he used to stalk his victims, conceal a hitlist, and insinuate himself into their lives.

Image of the front door of Evelyn Henderson’s home taken the day of her first house fire, an arson, on December 9, 2017

It’s humbling to admit at this moment, as the court decides the weight of David Crawford’s crimes, those which nearly destroyed me, that I have no power—only words. So, I’ll offer these, which I wrote from an extended-stay hotel in December 2017 after my home was deemed uninhabitable because of fire damage. “Sometimes there is no bright side in life and when this is your reality the only choice is to wait out the pain in faith.” This victim, “Evelyn,” is more than a name on David Crawford’s hit list. She is a person of worth and is tired of waiting and carrying her pain. She deserves more. She deserves justice.

All images other than those noted ©evelynhenderson