Nearly two years after 12-year-old Adriel Moxey was violently killed while walking home from school in the Bahamas, her mother Sasha Moxey is turning unimaginable grief into purpose by stepping into the college classroom her daughter was never able to attend. Now an art education major who has studied at the University of The Bahamas (UB) for roughly 18 months, Sasha says her daughter’s tragic death gave her the final push to act on long-discussed plans to pursue higher education that she had put off for years.
“She would have been the one heading to college next, not me,” Sasha shared in an interview with The Tribune. “When she passed, I just thought, why wait? It’s time for me to go to school in her place.”
Adriel, a seventh-grade student at Anatol Rodgers High School, vanished shortly after leaving campus on November 18, 2024. Two days later, searchers found her body in thick underbrush along Faith Avenue South, a wooded stretch of the route she walked home every day. Official police records confirmed the young student died from strangulation.
In a court hearing earlier this year, 39-year-old Chris Ferguson accepted a guilty plea to charges of murder, unlawful sexual assault, and unlawful detention for the attack. Justice Guillimina Archer-Minns ultimately sentenced Ferguson to 40 years behind bars. Prosecutors and court documents laid out the chilling details of the crime: Ferguson followed Adriel along the secluded bush path, tricked her into believing he lived nearby, and lured her into the vegetation, where he assaulted her before strangling her to death with a belt. Ferguson returned to the site the next day to move her body, investigators confirmed.
Before sentencing, Sasha publicly pushed for Ferguson to receive a mandatory life sentence, a demand she never backed down from. Today, she acknowledges that the legal process has reached its end, but the hole left by Adriel’s absence will never close.
“In one sense, there’s closure: the trial is over, and I never have to see that man again,” Sasha explained. “But it will never truly be closed, because she should still be right here with me.”
The start of each new school year amplifies that pain, she says. Watching local students gear up for their first day of classes brings back sharp memories of Adriel’s own back-to-school plans, including her wish for a new Sprayground backpack for the semester she never got to start. A mother of three surviving children, Sasha says there are still days when small moments trigger memories of Adriel’s laugh, their casual conversations, and her warm hugs.
To keep from being consumed by grief, Sasha fills her days with university coursework, part-time work, and caring for her family. Art was a shared passion between mother and daughter: Adriel often helped her mother sell her paintings to visiting tourists, a memory Sasha carries with her into every studio class she takes now. As she works toward her art education degree, Sasha says she is focused on finishing her program and building a better future in Adriel’s name. While she had talked about attending college for years before the tragedy, Adriel’s death made her realize there was no time to put her dream on hold.
“All I can do is take this one day at a time,” Sasha said. Even as nearly two years have passed, she makes no effort to pretend the pain has faded. “I will never get over losing her,” she said. “A piece of my life will always be missing, no matter how much time goes by.”