NY Daily News article on anniversary of Sean Bell's murder by NYPD

A year of pain for little girl Sean Bell barely got to know
BY NICOLE BODE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, November 24th 2007, 2:25 PM

Anderson/News
Jada Bell, 4, with her mom, Nicole Paultre Bell, and sister, Jordyn, looking on, shows picture she drew of her father, Sean Bell.

Sean Bell
Sean Bell's eldest daughter leans over a piece of paper, her crayons churning out white, puffy clouds with her father floating among them.
In the year since her dad was shot down in a hail of 50 police bullets, 4-year-old Jada Bell has drawn countless portraits of her father in heaven, each of them a heartbreaking insight into a child's grief.
"She draws him just like he was in real life," said her mom, Nicole Paultre Bell. "Every day, we talk about him. I couldn't .really tell you how many times - at any time, she'll bring him up. She misses her dad a lot."
In one drawing, a smiling Bell stands alongside his family as if he were still alive. Other Crayola sketches show him floating in the sky, looking down on his family below.
The idyllic pictures help shield the kindergartner from her father's last moments - a chaotic shootout as he left his bachelor party at a Queens nightclub a year ago Sunday.
Bell was killed and his friends Trent Benefield, 24, and Joseph Guzman, 32, were wounded by NYPD officers who mistakenly believed they had a gun.
Three detectives indicted in the shooting - Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper - are set to go on trial Feb. 4. Oliver and Isnora are charged with manslaughter; Cooper is charged with reckless endangerment.
Jada's dreamlike pictures also belie a deeper sadness that has cloaked Paultre Bell, 23; Jada, and 1-year-old Jordyn ever since Bell's death.
In school, Jada grows silent each time her teacher leads the class in sing-alongs about moms and dads - shrinking away as classmates pipe up about their parents, Paultre Bell found out at a recent parent-teacher conference.
"I had to tell her, just because you don't see Daddy every day doesn't mean that you don't have a father. You always have a father," Paultre Bell said. "He's watching out from up in the sky. You just can't see him."
On Father's Day, Jada's class painted little wooden jewelry boxes. She wrote on the back of hers, "I love you Daddy," and left it at Bell's grave.
The toll is harder to measure with little Jordyn - who's too young to remember or appear in many of the photos and home movies that Paultre Bell relies on to help Jordyn learn about her missing father.
"It's just hard knowing that she'll never know her father. She'll only know him from the home videos that I show her and the pictures," Paultre Bell said.
The grief underlies everything Paultre Bell has had to deal with in the past year - including the sudden transition to single motherhood and the highly contentious court case in which she has attended every hearing and spoken out publicly about each development.
"She knows nothing can bring Sean back. But she hopes that if justice is done, other families will not have to suffer the way hers has and continues to," said Paultre Bell's lawyer Sanford Rubenstein.
Bell's family and friends plan to hold a candlelight vigil in his memory from 11 tonight until 5 a.m. tomorrow on Liverpool St. between 94th and 95th Aves. in Jamaica, where the shooting erupted.
Paultre Bell has relied heavily on the support of her relatives and Bell's parents, William and Valerie Bell.
"I've seen them grow - that's the good thing," William Bell said. "You see a life grow before you, instead of \[being\] taken away.
Still, Paultre Bell struggles with the pain.
"I just keep asking myself, 'Why does it have to be my children? Why me? Why do we have to be the ones to go through this?' " she said. "I have to try to make it better for [them]. . . . I pray all the time, 'God give me the strength to get through this.' "