Just months before she was deploying to Dubai, Angel Conner flew home to Cocoa from Fort Sill, Okla., to spend the holidays with her 6-year-old son, friends and family.
For 14 days, the one-time Cocoa High basketball player met up with friends, shared precious memories with her mother and played with her son — not knowing it would be the last time she would see them.
A few weeks later on Jan. 28, the 28-year-old U.S. Army soldier would return home once again. This time, in a flag-draped coffin carried by soldiers quietly marching on an airport tarmac at dusk as her anguished parents watched.
Angel was killed, not on a battlefield or in an accident, but, according to Oklahoma police, at the hands of another soldier on Jan. 18.
There was a domestic dispute at her apartment, police said, that ended in gun violence.
“Our lives are forever changed. She was so beautiful…so good,” said Gail Conner, who tearfully met her daughter’s body at Orlando International Airport.
Her heart sank further when she looked at her daughter’s face — marred, battered and swollen.
Angel had been shot six times, police in Lawton, Okla., said.
Acceptance”This was just so unreal. She was so happy with life. She knew who she was. She was focused, and despite all of that, this happened,” Gail Conner told FLORIDA TODAY. “People need to know what happened.”
When police used the words “domestic violence,” Angel’s family was stunned.
Known by friends as vibrant and often outspoken, Angel Conner was in a relationship with the suspect, and, outside of a dispute that turned into a tussle last year, there was nothing to point to her being abused.
There were no obvious warnings. No restraining orders; no formal complaints from Angel Conner during the nine-month period she dated the man accused of killing her, family members said.