‘Why didn’t my child have a search?’ Fort Worth teen missing since May was killed
Kim Brown was in her room, asleep, when she was awoken by loud knocks. She fumbled out of bed, threw on some clothes and went to the front door, where two Fort Worth police detectives were waiting for her.
They didn’t need to say anything. Kim, 46, already knew why they were there.
In late May, the single mother’s youngest son, 17-year-old Malik Rashad Brown, went missing. The last time she saw him, it was Memorial Day and he was leaving to spend the holiday night with a neighbor. He didn’t come home.
It didn’t seem entirely unusual when he wasn’t back the next morning, Kim remembers thinking — they must have extended their hangout without telling her, like “typical kids.” But, as the day dragged on and she learned he wasn’t at the neighbor’s house, her worries grew. She called him in as missing the next morning, after 24 hours.
Days passed with no trace of Malik, and Kim eventually pushed for his picture to make it onto the Texas Department of Public Safety Missing Persons Clearinghouse, with calls spreading across the state to help find him. More days passed with no news. Then weeks.
When the two detectives came to Kim’s front door on July 24, it felt like confirmation of something she already knew: Her son was dead.
They told her his remains were found two days earlier.
“Basically, in so many words, they found him and he was deceased,” said Kim, who remembers she began to cry. “That was my baby boy. I can’t explain my reaction … of course, cry. I did want to scream.”
“I’ve cried and screamed day after day, wondering why.”
She and Malik’s other family and friends continue to grapple with the sudden loss of the young man who would’ve been a senior this year at Lake Worth High School. They’re also searching for answers — not only about who killed him and why, but where and how.
So far, they haven’t found any. Only more questions.
Fort Worth police on Thursday confirmed Malik was found dead on July 22 and his death is being investigated as a homicide. But they haven’t said how Malik died or where his body was found.
When emailed for a comment on this story, police said in a statement: “We are still investigating and are not at a point that we have information that we want to share.”
The Star-Telegram also sent a public records request to the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office for a copy of Brown’s autopsy report. However, in a statement, legal assistant Polly S. Maxwell said the case is still pending.
“Until all the testing is performed and the physician has signed the autopsy report, no information can be released,” she said.
Malik’s remains were released to a funeral home, which cremated them, Kim said. Police told her “there was no body” to provide, she said, “just remains.” She said they didn’t elaborate.
The medical examiner also informed Kim that Malik died as the result of a homicide, she said. But she hasn’t been able to get a copy of the still-unfinished autopsy report.
The ambiguity and lack of answers has added to Kim’s pain, as well as her frustrations with police. She says the department initially misidentified her son as a runaway, not believing her when she said he went missing, and the investigation was delayed by about two weeks.
She additionally alleges police didn’t immediately launch a search for her son, and she had to do it on her own.
Police didn’t answer a list of questions for this story, including how they would respond to Kim’s claims about law enforcement not taking the case seriously enough.
Although Kim wants to understand how Malik died and what he was going through in his final moments, she has had to proceed with the process of saying goodbye.
More than 300 of Malik’s friends and family members showed up to his funeral service on Aug. 17 in Memphis, where Kim is from and Malik was raised. He was remembered as a caring, thoughtful and outgoing young man, with a passion for playing football and dreams of one day becoming an NFL player. A choir sang and loved ones rose to read remembrances.
Kim couldn’t get up to talk, though.
It was too hard.
“I’m still hurt. I’m still in pain. I still have sleepless nights,” she said. “I don’t have the words to tell anyone what it feels like.”
‘Why didn’t my child have a search?’
Before 24 hours passed since Kim had last seen her son, she went around the neighborhood to look for him on her own.
She talked to neighbors, friends and people she passed on the street, but no one knew where he was. When it came time to go to the Fort Worth Police Department, Kim was prepared to get the search going for her son, sure it wouldn’t be in his character to run away.
Police pushed back, she said.
“The police put in their records that he was a runaway. Not one time did I say out of my mouth my son had run away from the house,” Kim said. “I specifically said that my son went missing.”
Police entered runaway in their report, despite Kim’s objections, she said. And she was left to continue searching on her own.
For several days, she filled up cars with people — Malik’s friends from high school, her daughter’s friends, her own friends who came from out of town — and scoured their neighborhood. They went to apartments he had visited, gas stations, corner stores. They hung up fliers with a picture of Malik in a white T-shirt, a smile on his face, with the caption “please call.”
Police still hadn’t begun a search, Kim said.
“Why didn’t my child have a search? Why was I out putting out fliers? Why was I out with kids looking for my child?” she said. “Why did I have to do it?”
She called the Missing Persons Clearinghouse as police continued to classify her son as a runaway. An official from the organization, she said, eventually called Fort Worth police and had them change the classification from runaway to missing person.
Malik was last seen on May 27 outside a Shell station on Jacksboro Highway, the alerts read. The station is down a long road from the Browns’ home, Kim said.
She says police didn’t begin looking for surveillance videos until two weeks after Malik went missing, when a detective called her and began asking questions about the gas station.
“It shouldn’t take two weeks later for you to do those things,” Kim said.
She said she “documented everything” through the investigation, to see what was — and wasn’t — done to find her son.
But there’s still so much she doesn’t know.
“What I do know,” Kim said, “is my son didn’t deserve any of it.”
Remembering Malik
At the funeral service, the pastor spoke about how, in the wake of tragedies, people often say everything happens for a reason and God has a plan.
But she made a point that was not the case here. She asked the crowd to repeat after her:
“It was not God’s will that Malik died like this.”
Voices filled the room, repeating her words. Loved ones also eulogized Malik, remembering him as a caring, loving and fun person to be around.
And his siblings — an older sister and brother in college, and a younger sister at Lake Worth High — penned remembrances for the funeral program.
“We never thought this day would come,” his sisters wrote in a message, together. “The moment that you left us our hearts split in two pieces ... We’ll never forget how you always brought a smile to our faces.”
In a poem, his brother wrote: “You are my brother not by choice/but by the nature of our birth/I could not have chosen a better one/you were the best on Earth.”
When Kim remembers her son, she said, she thinks about a talkative kid who was humble at the same time, and had a deep empathy for other people.
His love for life came out when he played football, one of his biggest passions, Kim said. He was a safety for the Lake Worth High School JV football team and would’ve suited up again this year.
He wanted to become an NFL player, Kim said, and he had received emails from schools such as East Texas Baptist University inviting him to attend summer training camps.
Kim has been watching clips of Malik playing football when she feels sad and wants to remember him. She has also watched a clip of him singing happy birthday to her on her birthday last year.
She watched it on her birthday, earlier in August.
“He’ll never get a chance to sing it again,” Kim said. “Nobody understands what that feels like.”
‘I don’t think I’ll ever have closure’
Kim still has nights with no sleep. The questions keep her awake.
She wonders where in all of the “huge” city of Fort Worth that Malik was when he left this Earth. She wonders how he died. She wonders who was responsible.
She never picked up on Malik feeling uneasy or scared before he went missing, she said. And she can’t think of anyone who would want to harm him.
It would bring her some peace of mind, she said, if clear answers emerged and someone were to confess to killing her son and wind up behind bars. “You took a life,” she said of this person.
But she’s not sure she’ll ever fully get over it.
“I don’t think I’ll ever have closure,” she said. “I would think it’d be a partial closure, but never a full closure.”
This story was originally published August 30, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
