‘It may not happen’: Mother wants closure in 2004 slaying of Richland Co. teen

One night 13 years ago, Silene Eaddy left her family’s Hopkins home to walk around the corner to a neighbor’s house. She never came home.

The 15-year-old’s battered and burned body was found two days later on April 17, 2004, lying facedown in a wooded area near Montgomery Lane and Pincushion Road in Lower Richland. Firefighters responding to a brush fire early that morning found the teen as they fought the blaze.

There have been no arrests in the killing, which was turned over to the Richland County Sheriff’s Department’s cold case unit.

“It’s never gonna be easier because I don’t know what happened,” said Silene’s mother, Brenda McCoy. “Now, if I find out what happened, then I can kind of rest my mind.”

McCoy initially was a foster mother to Silene, who was known by friends and family as “Erica,” and adopted the girl when she was 3 years old.

“With her being as small as she was, I didn’t want her to go from house to house,” said McCoy, 65. “I wanted her to have a stable home.”

Erica loved to dance and sing, and was part of a community gospel choir. McCoy tried to give her a stable home, but said the girl wanted to find her biological mother.

“Erica was a sweet child but a lost child,” McCoy said. “... She was trying to find her family. She always wanted to know where they were. We couldn’t find them. We didn’t know where to look.”

Friends would confide in Erica for advice, and while she was good at giving advice, “she wasn’t good at living that advice she gave,” McCoy said.

The death of McCoy’s husband, Fred, when Erica was younger had a devastating effect on the girl.

“That was her best friend,” McCoy said. “When she lost him, it was just over.”

McCoy thinks this was partly the reason Erica ran away from home on several occasions and started hanging out with certain groups of people.

“She, evidently, was hanging out with the wrong people, which we found out to be many,” said Gene Mincey, one of four cold case investigators assigned to Erica’s case. “Her mother really loved her. She was trying to help her.”

Investigators, along with McCoy, believe Erica knew who killed her. Mincey said soot was found in her airways during an autopsy, indicating she was alive and breathing when she was set on fire.

Part of the killer’s reasoning for setting the fire probably was to cover evidence, Mincey said. “The other part of it was just (to be) mean.”

Detectives found tire tracks at the scene, Mincey said. They are following several leads but still need people to come forward with tips.

“We want to try to help the family and give them some kind of closure,” he said. “Her adoptive mother will never have closure. You can never completely get it out of (your) mind.”

McCoy says she has tried to stay strong while raising Erica’s younger siblings, Eugene and Destiny, who are now 23 and 16, respectively. Still, she wants to know who killed her oldest child and why.

“The only thing I can do is wait and hope the police find something out or catch who did it,” she said. “I may be dead and gone (when it happens), and it may not happen.”

Even if an arrest is made, McCoy said, forgiving the killer or killers might not be possible at this point.

“They took a part of me, and they did it and left her there,” she said.

This story was originally published April 30, 2017 at 8:16 PM with the headline "‘It may not happen’: Mother wants closure in 2004 slaying of Richland Co. teen."