How can a 4-year-old boy understand when his father is almost gone, in the silent space between life and death?
“Why my daddy won’t talk to me?” Torin Davenport Jr. would say in the assisted living center at the bedside. The father’s eyes would be either closed or open, but vacant, as he lay for months last year with tubes and hoses encircling his body.
“Well baby,” grandma Tamaika Sadavi would say, “he can’t talk now.”
If anyone told him, the child also likely couldn’t grasp the circumstances that brought his father to this state and ultimately led to his death, as well as murder charges filed this week.
On May 27, the elder Torin Davenport, 24, was beaten by three men in an apartment on Columbia Drive, police said. This was supposed to be punishment because he’d allegedly hit his wife earlier in the day.
The wife told police she’d been asleep when the men burst into the apartment. She said they fled after one of them connected a punch to the left side of her husband’s face, knocking him unconscious, according to a report. The punch caused bleeding and swelling in his brain.
Investigators believe the wife tried to stop the assault, but the men held her back.
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Police identified the men as Bruce McDaye, 24, Kenneth Calloway, 30, and Elton Calloway, 26. Elton Calloway is the wife’s brother, Kenneth Calloway a cousin, according to the victim’s mother.
Sadavi said she doesn’t know if her son, who was an aspiring rapper and in between jobs, hit his wife, but there had been rumblings about fights.
“I told her if he did hit her, call the police because I don’t want nothing happening to my son,” Sadavi told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday. The wife, whose name is withheld because she is alleged to be a victim of domestic abuse, couldn’t be reached for comment.
DeKalb police said no one called on May 27 until after Davenport hit the apartment floor.
Police charged the suspects with aggravated assault and they got out on bond while Davenport languished in assisted living.
Sadavi brought her grandson to sit with him. When the child complained of his father’s silence, the grandmother told him to just tell his dad about his day.
The child did his best.
Doctors said the 24-year-old didn’t know what was happening.
“But he’d open his eyes,” Sadavi said. “It was the hardest time, to see him lifeless.”
He died Oct. 30. The charges were upgraded to murder after the medical examiner’s office ruled the death a homicide this week.
The suspects are back in jail. Attempts to reach their attorneys weren’t successful Wednesday.
Sadavi said, if her son hit his wife, someone should’ve called and got the police involved instead of seeking their own justice.
Now so many people hurt, she said. The 4-year-old is without a father, the wife without a husband, and the suspects’ families, including their children, are all left to try to understand.
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