Even Michelle Hord herself can't always quite grasp what happened.
"I struggle with it every day," the former TV producer told E!'s Justin Sylvester of facing the reality that her daughter is gone, and that it was the child's own dad who killed her. "If I get some crazy Facebook pop-up picture from several years ago where I'm with Gabrielle and her father at Disneyland, to be able to say somehow that was true. And this is true."
But as the 52-year-old wrote in her new book The Other Side of Yet: Finding a Light in the Midst of Darkness, in which she details the depths of her grief and how she pulled herself out of that abyss, "It's critical to eventually be able to say to yourself, Things are different now. I have to make different choices now. My reality changed and I have a new reality now."
Hord told E! that, while she had been journaling for her own purposes, she hadn't planned to write a book about her experience until the COVID-19 pandemic upended everyone's lives in 2020, creating a "universal 'before'" feeling as people grappled with the so-called new normal.
"I realized that, while my journey was very specific to me, and fortunately most people will never have to deal with what I dealt with," she explained, "whether it's divorce, breakups, infertility, losing a job, we all have these 'before' moments in our lives, when we realize life is not going to look like we thought. And so the book is about how do you get to that, yet pivot to the other side to hopefully more happiness, more abundance, more life."
For Hord, getting to a place where she could let herself feel happiness without also feeling it was somehow wrong to experience it was a battle in and of itself.
"It was clear this was worse than my worst nightmare, who did it, how it happened," she said. "I felt like there was something in this universe that was trying to take me out."
But something inside her refused to go under. "Whatever this is, I am not going to let it beat me," she remembered the feeling. "I'm not going to let it win. And so a bit of that angry, defensive Black mama in me I think also helped guide me and give me strength."
As a producer on America's Most Wanted, her first job out of journalism school, Hord spent several years witnessing the worst moments of people's lives, and a common thread throughout her time on the show was the shocked insistences from those reacting to a crime that "this doesn't happen here." Whatever "this" was at any given time.
"It's surreal to be on the other side of that story," she admitted, "to be on the other side of that police tape after working as a producer for so many years."
Hord said that there had been no "visible signs" of danger in her marriage. While she wrote in her book that her ex had "anger issues" that revealed themselves when their romance began, she stressed to E!, "I wanted a divorce because it wasn't working out, but [there was] nothing that suggested physical or emotional danger for myself or my daughter."
She met Neil White (whom she refers to in the book by a pseudonym because, she told E!, "I believe that person no longer exists") when he was her brother's resident assistant at the University of Connecticut. There was an instant attraction, but they were just friends for a decade while keeping in touch long distance.
They started dating when Hord eventually moved to New York to work as a producer at Good Morning America, and they married on Sept. 29, 2007.
Looking at her wedding pictures now is "complicated and heartbreaking," she acknowledged in her book, though she couldn't deny that "all of it was real," that it had been a joyful day full of love. After her daughter's death, she wrote, Hord's friends and loved ones helped her go through the photos and cut White out of them.
After an uneventful pregnancy that doctors had deemed "high risk" because Hord was 39, their "miracle baby" was born Aug. 3, 2009, she wrote, "a dream come true."
And, the author continued, "Like most little girls, Gabrielle loved her dad."
But while there was a definite father-daughter bond between them, and "on the outside, our lives were a model of the American dream," Hord wrote of seeing "fault lines" in her husband's character develop as his insecurities began to reveal themselves. Still, she added, "the safety and well-being of our daughter was never a concern."
While they had plenty of good times, White's career instability—while Hord's professional trajectory pointed ever upward—created "cracks in the foundation of what we were building," she wrote. By the time Gabrielle turned 7 in 2016, Hord felt that her marriage was "beyond repair" after multiple attempts at counseling, and she asked White for a divorce.
The process turned "tumultuous," Hord told E!, so much so that she moved out of the family's home in New Rochelle, N.Y., and into a rental house. First, she detailed in the book, White agreed to sign the papers on April 16, 2017, Easter Sunday, but "then continued to fight and manipulate me for the next six to seven weeks" before they settled on a new date: June 5, 2017.
She "slept well" that night, Hord recalled to E!. "Woke up the next morning and went to work expecting to see him and my daughter that afternoon."
Instead, "I got this call from my nanny with this blood-curdling scream, and it was clear she was in a crime scene," Hord continued. "Because I assumed my daughter was at school, where she was supposed to be, it took my brain a few minutes to just process what the possibilities were."
Hord called a close friend and fellow mom to ask if she had seen Gabrielle at their kids' school that day. "When she said no, my heart just sunk," Hord said. "I knew, and I went into a little room and shut the door. In the closet, shut the door, got on my knees and said, 'God, I do not know what I'm walking into. But whatever it is, please just give me the strength to deal with it.'"
Their nanny, Tonette Mahon, had gone to the house after White texted her saying the second-grader was sick and would be staying home from school that day. Mahon thought it was strange that Hord hadn't called to tell her that herself.
According to the Westchester County District Attorney's Office and WABC TV, the sitter arrived at the house and went upstairs, where White emerged from his bedroom bleeding from what turned out to be self-inflicted wounds to his wrists. He told her that Gabrielle was "resting." Mahon ran out of the house and called police and the child's mother.
Officers found Gabrielle's body in her bed shortly after 3 p.m. Cause of death was asphyxia by smothering.
Hord's longtime pastor, the Rev. W. Franklyn Richardson, was outside the house when she arrived, and "that moment, obviously will just be seared in my memory," she told Good Morning America last month. "My pastor standing there, grabbing me out of the car to tell me that she was gone."
White, who was in his room when police showed up, was taken to the hospital to get stitches and put under arrest the night of June 6, and arraigned on murder charges the next day in New Rochelle City Court.
Reporters descended on the crime scene, the America's Most Wanted tableau Hord knew all too well complete. "They were always pleasant and they always appeared happy," Derek Lewis, a neighbor with a son around Gabrielle's age, told New York's ABC 7. "Very unexpected, I'm devastated."
Another neighbor, Evoni Legette, told CBS 2 News, "Nothing you can say but pray. Pray for the family, pray for the little girl. That's all you can do."
New Rochelle Police said, per USA Today's LoHud.com, that they had gone to the house once before, in response to a call in January 2017, following an argument between White and Hord that was resolved without further intervention. (Hord wrote in her book that it wasn't until they were in the middle of divorce proceedings that "my physical safety ever crossed my mind. And even then, the one thing I knew for sure was that he would never do anything to hurt our baby.")
White told Detective Michael Messina at the hospital that "all feelings came through" when the divorce papers were delivered for him to sign, according to a typed account of the interview included in court documents obtained by The Journal News. White said he was upset that his daughter would be living in a single-parent household and that he wouldn't be spending as much time with her, Messina recounted, and "he did not want her to suffer."
According to the detective, White at first told Messina that he last spoke to Gabrielle at 11 a.m. on June 6, and she told him she was tired. Asked how she died, White said that "she wasn't breathing well and that she just lost her breath." Questioned further, however, White said he put a pillow over his daughter's face sometime between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Richardson, the pastor, told CBS 2 News at the time that Hord was "a woman of great faith. I expect her to get through this. It will not be easy, and will never be over."
Asked how she did, ultimately, find the unfathomable strength to keep going each day after this happened, Hord said her faith was essential as she rebuilt her life, telling E!, "I think being tethered—whether it's [to] a god, the universe, Mother Nature, in something bigger than yourself—helps you when you want to float away."
Seeking out trauma therapy fairly immediately was also key, she emphasized.
"I knew if I was going to fight to survive I needed every tool that was out there," Hord said. "So I depended heavily on therapy, and I think that goes to the shame as well. You know, Black women are supposed to be superwomen and so strong. And I'm the first to say, 'Somehow I am doing it and you would, too, if you were in my shoes. I do not have a cape. I am not a supernova advocate."
Therapy also helped get her through the inevitable questions and finger-pointing from those who insisted she must have seen this coming, that there had to have been signs.
"I think people feel like they have to say something," she said. "People that have told me it was God's will, and I've told them what I thought of them and their impression of God's will. You know, people need to find a solution, a why, and so if they can point the finger—it must have been the mother, it must have been that neighbor, it must have been [whoever]—they think they can see something. But living in it, the only way to find peace is to say there's nothing I could have done."
In August 2017, the Hord Foundation, which Michelle's parents started in 1993 to provide scholarships for underprivileged youth in their home state of Connecticut, donated $10,000 to the Girls Scouts Heart of the Hudson in Gabrielle's honor, the child having been a member of her local troop.
The following month, Hord held a memorial to scatter Gabrielle's ashes at sea that was attended by 25 of the child's classmates and their parents, collective healing also having been at the forefront of the grieving mother's mind throughout her ordeal.
They played Gabrielle's favorite songs and Hord gave each child a white rose to put in the water.
Hord has since launched Gabrielle's Wings, a nonprofit seeking to improve access to education, extracurricular activities and recreational space for elementary-school-age children in underserved communities. "For me, as a mother," she told E!, "it was important that the work and legacy in her name would be 10-times bigger than what happened to her, and that what happened to her would not define who she was."
White pleaded not guilty but was convicted of second-degree murder in July 2019.
Hord spoke at his sentencing hearing that October, describing Gabrielle's death as "a razor-blade cut of trauma, memory, pain, confusion, betrayal and disbelief."
All three of them had asthma, Hord said, holding one of her daughter's dolls, and even though White knew what it was like to not be able to breath, "Gabrielle's daddy willfully and evilly chose to take that away from a baby who he once seemed to love and a daughter who he ultimately used as a pawn. My heart and soul have literally been ripped from the body by this man."
White was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
While forgiveness wasn't in the cards—"Forgiveness is about someone who is seeking forgiveness, which is not the case," Hord told E!—she focused on reconciliation instead.
"My version of making peace has been to reconnect with [White's] mother, Gabrielle's grandmother, who not only lost a grandchild but had her only child do this to her only grandchild," she explained. "And so in reconnecting with her, going back to church with her, to the church that we went to with her son and her granddaughter, that reconciliation has been the olive branch that has meant the most."
Getting to a point where she could enjoy herself again, let alone find love and trust another person, was an uphill climb that resulted in more than a few Sisyphean moments. But when it happened, it just...happened.
"I was not looking," Hord shared. "Seemed like a nice guy, didn't think much of it. And all of a sudden I realized I was falling in love."
Hord remarried last year and she shared an expression she loves from her husband, Axel Johnson, which is that "'Good things happen for a reason'"—as opposed to the old "everything happens for a reason," which she finds suspect.
But she firmly believes that when life comes calling with its challenges, nothing more is required than what's already within us.
"I don't believe there's a grief index," Hord said. "You know, it's easy to look at me and say, 'Oh, I couldn't do that.' But we all have things in our lives that we struggle with that cause us to have to find the guts to say, 'Yet in spite of that, I'm going to continue.'"
Of course, she also said of becoming a source of strength for others, "I did not choose this. What happened was, I had people write me letters and say, 'Michelle, I had not prayed in years until I saw you speak at Gabrielle's funeral.' 'Michelle, I watched you go to work every day and it's inspiring to me.' And I realized the holes in my heart were letting light of hope come through for other people. So this wasn't really about me, it was about honoring her spirit and hopefully giving other people hope."
With what would have been Gabrielle's 13th birthday approaching, Hord admitted that seeing her daughter's classmates and her own friends' children getting older has been "a double-edged sword."
"I want to remain in the lives of these people that I love," she said. "I was a class mom, I knew all the kids. One of my best friends had a daughter two weeks before [I did] and they're both named Gabrielle. We didn't know we were having daughters."
It's hard, but "I wouldn't not be in their lives," Hord said. "And for me, it's still worth the pain to be connected to that love."
But to be clear, she said frankly, her book is "not a happily ever after" story. "It's not, 'I lost a limb and it grew back.' It is, 'How do I learn to carry this with me?'"
Talking about what happened is still difficult, no matter how many people she speaks to or how much she put down on paper. "This is not a book anyone would have chosen to write, this is a testimony," she explained.
While she still struggles to accept what happened every day, Hord reflected, "I had to lose the expectation of the 'why' and [accept] that there would never be an explanation. And so that, if anything, has given me a little bit of peace, that it will never make sense."
Learn more about Gabrielle's Wings here. The Other Side of Yet: Finding Light in the Midst of Darkness is available wherever books are sold.