A mom's hard life ends with a bullet

Editor's note: This story ran Tuesday.

ROCK HILL -- On a Rock Hill front porch that is just a concrete slab, sitting on a folding chair borrowed from her job as a housekeeper, 65-year-old Brenda Langley said of her dead daughter:

"She sowed her wild oats."

Langley has worked forever at housekeeping at White Oak Manor assisted living to make money to raise a family - and now, it is three grandkids that need raising.

These youngest of her daughter's six kids have lived with Langley for years, and she has no earthly idea where she will find the money for a burial and funeral that came without warning.

"I'm here raising her young'uns, but she was my daughter and I loved her," said Langley of her oldest daughter, 43-year-old Katherine Ballard McManus, who died a murder victim.

"But I have to give her a proper burial and funeral. People at work have helped me. Some friends of the family, too."

McManus, who lived all her life in Rock Hill until the last year, rarely worked steadily except for a stretch at a Waffle House and one plant in York, her family said.

She got pregnant young and got married. Then, she had more kids. McManus was also known for singing karaoke in bars.

About a year ago, she met a guy on the Internet, family said, and she left for Virginia to be with Christopher Neil Dotson.

Dotson, 21, was less than half her age, and McManus had kids older than he was.

She stayed in Virginia until a little after 9 p.m. April 30, in a rural place called Franklin County, Va., famous for moonshine - between Roanoke and Martinsville, where the race cars run loud and fast.

That's when McManus was found dead by police - a gunshot wound to her head.

Police set up roadblocks after the shooting, Franklin County Sheriff Ewell Hunt said, and soon after, Dotson and the gun police believe was used to kill McManus were found in a house.

Dotson faces murder and weapons charges, Hunt said, and is being held without bond in a state jail.

The shooting is under investigation, Hunt said, but it was the result of a domestic dispute.

McManus had been splitting time between Franklin County and another Virginia county not too far off, Hunt said, and she and Dotson were in an "on-again, off-again relationship."

"But he's in jail, and he ain't talking much," the sheriff said. "Far as we know, she had no trouble around here. She's the victim."

No trouble until she was shot and killed inside Dotson's grandfather's mobile home - so far from where her own kids and the heroic grandmother who is raising them - are.

'I'd choose you'

Jamie Ballard, 24, is McManus' oldest son. He said he met Dotson and didn't think much of his mother's boyfriend.

Ballard lived through Department of Social Services investigations when he was a child, as well as his mother's practice of leaving the kids with their grandmother.

He acknowledged "Katherine," as he called her, was not the best mother. But, he said, "she tried, and she loved me. I know it."

William McManus, the second-oldest at 23, said his mother "struggled with life." He, too, met Dotson and did not like him.

"She did not deserve what she got," William McManus said. "This guy... He deserves whatever punishment he gets. I hope he suffers like she suffered."

Kristian McManus, 21, who said she stayed with her mother in Virginia for a while, put it this way: "My momma wasn't much of a mother, but she was my momma."

Kristian bought a necklace and a wall sign to put in McManus' casket. The sign read: "If I could choose from all the mothers in the world, I'd choose you."

What grandmothers do

Katherine Ballard McManus was arrested many times, according to the State Law Enforcement Division - for offenses including forgery, violating terms of her release from jail, obtaining property under false pretenses and providing beer to minors.

Her mother, working there in the heat of the laundry and cleaning supplies at the nursing home, said her daughter was far from perfect, and the probation people came to her doors - "back and front" - more than once.

But even with all of her faults, she said, her daughter did not deserve to be murdered.

Langley agreed to raise her grandkids because that is what grandmothers do - even when that grandmother is a senior citizen washing clothes and cleaning floors at a nursing home.

Anthony McManus, 15, is a student at Castle Heights Middle School, where he plays football, basketball and track.

His grandmother is raising him, and he said he goes to church regularly and loves it.

"She was my momma; I'd see her sometimes," Anthony said. "I'm gonna read from the Bible at the funeral."

The two youngest children are Timothy, 10, in the fourth grade; and Lizzie, 8, in the second grade. They know all about what happened to their mother.

"I was depressed when I heard somebody killed her," said Timothy, who then showed off a football picture of himself as No. 10 for a team called the Raiders.

For the funeral, he wore a suit vest and dress pants. His cowlick was wetted down to keep his hair straight.

Lizzie, who wore sandals and a sleeveless black print dress to watch her mother be buried, said, "My momma got shot dead."

All went to Parker Funeral Home for a funeral, then a burial at a cemetery. Langley, raising grandkids on a housekeeper's pay, somehow has to pay the funeral home that has been so gracious.

'Back to work'

Afterward, all came back to the Cauthen Street house, an old mill house on the old Industrial Mill hill.

There, the "somehow" of paying for death for working people showed up again in the grace of those who work with their hands and back for a living.

Dozens of ladies from White Oak, co-workers of Brenda Langley and her other daughter, Ashley Smith, brought food and set up tables and chairs.

That is what people do when a daughter of a co-worker is dead from bullets. They came wearing their nursing uniforms and their housekeeping uniforms and they gave all they could give.

McManus' past is "irrelevant" in a time of need, said Deborah Davis, who has worked with Langley for so long.

The co-workers - men and women, black and white, dozens of them from management down to maintenance - donated money to help pay for the burial.

They did it because of their love for their friend, for Brenda Langley.

After she buried her daughter, Langley said late Monday one more thing that all working people know after a funeral.

"I'm going back to work tomorrow."

This story was originally published May 10, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "A mom's hard life ends with a bullet."