Brother hopes memory of murdered sister, Julie Tran, lives on
Posted Nov 20, 2015 4:05 pm.
Last Updated Nov 20, 2015 4:11 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
“I wasn’t too sure how to handle myself, not too sure where to go. It’s actually really devastating.”
Those words from Billy Tran, the brother of Julie Tran, who was killed in a Coventry Hills home on Oct. 19.
She was at the home with her caregiver, 54-year-old Selamawit Alem, Tran’s giver.
Alem’s son, Emanuel Kahsai, is charged in the pair’s murders.
“I haven’t actually seen him yet. I’m not too sure how I would respond when I do finally meet him. In 2005, he obviously lost his brother as well, for a stabbing incident. I can’t express enough how sad that cycle of abuse is and now he is no better than any of the things that happened to him before. He is now, in my eyes, just like that man that killed his brother,” Tran told 660 NEWS.
But it’s not the crime or the way his sister died that he’s hoping Calgarians remember.
He wants people to know what kind of person she was.
“We grew up in foster care, you see. Ever since we were growing up, it was just me and her. We would handle each other, we would take care of each other, whatever we needed, we were there for each other.”
“Given her development disability, she was very developmentally delayed and so she didn’t have very many friends, she had a couple here and there, but it was just me and her,” Tran added.
Julie wanted to be a floral designer and received a certificate in floral design from Mount Royal University.
“She was so colourful, and she was so strong, so strong. People would make fun of her, and whatnot, and she would have the strength to be able to brush it off and say ‘whatever, those people don’t really mean anything to me’. She held the people who were close to her, close to her.”
“She would go to the end of the world for anybody.”