Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
TEEN’S DEATH IS STILL MOURNED
Crockett’s family said a utility worker found the bodies about 180 feet from each other.
Davis is facing three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder, according to North Las Vegas Justice Court logs, which didn’t list his attorney. He’s being held without bail.
Protective older brother
Crockett was the firstborn child in a family with seven sisters, including one who was on the way at the time of his death. He was described as a protective, loving brother.
Frost, the second oldest, remembers a hard-nosed older brother who was also kind. They would play video games together. Schneider recalls running around the house, and Xavier chasing them.
His mother recalled Xavier as a little boy, who, when he was 3, wanted to cut his long, “beautiful” curly hair.
“I love your hair,” the mother said. “I want to cut it,” he replied. “I don’t want people thinking I’m a girl.”
“See, it’s better, it’s better,” Simms recalled her son saying after the cut.
He was always more mature than his age suggested, said Simms, noting brutally honest conversations with him about him hanging around the wrong people. “Yes mom, yes mom,” he would say to the warnings about the dangerous streets of North Las Vegas.
But despite what trouble he got into, he was never a bad kid, she said.
Simms soon got him involved in their church. He excelled in Bible study and could quickly recite quiz answers, she said. He also worked at his stepfather’s upholstery business.
“I find it so unfair”
Before the shooting, the family home burned down, and they moved to Summerlin. Crockett, who wanted to continue attending Bonanza High School, persuaded his mother to let him stay at his aunt’s house. Simms would check in with him every day, making sure he was behaving and going to class.
It was unlike Crockett to not show up to school, and Simms had spent the entire night before he was discovered dead looking for him. She felt anxious and knew something wasn’t right — she called it an “intuition.”
When she got the phone call reporting the bodies, she grabbed Frost and headed to the area. She saw a coroner’s van. She ran to the police on the perimeter, who didn’t let her through to the crime scene.
Losing a child “is the most gut-wrenching feeling I’ve ever had in my entire life,” the mother said, tearing up. “Somebody just rips your heart out and said, ‘OK, I’m sorry, you just keep on going … I’m going to take that part of you, you just keep going,’ and I find it so unfair,” she added.
Visions of a smiling son
In the past 24 years, Frost has found herself sobbing at each thought of her brother.
“For me being a 12-year-old girl, it broke me, it definitely changed my outlook in life,” Frost said. “I will never be the same.”
People speak about grief getting better over time, but for her the pain has “been a long, lingering thing.”
Same for Schneider, who said, “We were so broken, it totally destroyed us,” noting that they missed most of the school year after the shooting.
She’s found herself trying to learn more about her brother, going to his former schools and looking for yearbooks. On his birthday, April 8, and his death anniversary, or when she looks at his picture in her car, she bursts into tears.
Schneider has two sons, one whose middle name is Xavier. She tells her boys about their uncle.
About two years ago, she contacted police for an update on her brother’s case. When they told her they would look into it, there was a slight hope that closure was near.
Instead, it “opened up a wound that I wasn’t ready for,” she said.
For two years after his death, every morning around 4 a.m., Simms said she would see a vision of her son in the doorway, smiling at her.
For a long time, Schneider saw a white butterfly in her backyard that she could swear represented her brother, she said.
It’s these small signs that the family has hung on to all these years. The painful anniversaries they spend together, one last November when they got matching tattoos of the butterfly.
But now, as Xavier’s birthday quickly approaches, and later the 25th anniversary of his death, the family has closure to look forward to, though they know they will never fully heal.
“This year we have to do something extremely big,” Schneider said about Nov. 8, thinking about COVID-19 restrictions. “Lay him to peace and give ourselves peace.”