'Minutes too late:' Inside a mother's search for answers after her child's death

On Oct. 20, 2023, shortly after 10 a.m., Racheal Blakney called 911, fearing that Russell Blakney, the father of her 11-year-old twins, would harm their children.

More than 17 hours later, at around 3:30 a.m., Racheal's son, Cyrus, was killed, shot in the head by his father, who had poured gasoline around their house on Brentwood Lane and lit it on fire, then shot and killed himself, all while law enforcement officers attempted to negotiate from outside the house. Cyrus' twin, Piper, was pulled from the burning house by an officer. Although close to death, she ultimately survived.

Today, Racheal Blakney is piecing her life back together, trying to make sense of the tragedy that, six months ago, radically changed her life and the life of her remaining child.

She is searching for answers, and those answers, she has found, are elusive.

"Nobody will release any information," she said. "I don't even know who was all there. I don't even know the responding officers that were taking care of my family or were supposed to be taking care of my family. I have no idea. I know one person's name, and that's the officer that retrieved my daughter."

Blakney has a file folder full of information. She and her sister, Rebecca Eckes, have researched police policy and North Carolina public records law. She filed a motion at the Gaston County Courthouse asking a judge to release all police recordings from that day, which includes body camera footage. But the information she has found doesn't tell the full story, she feels.

"I was scouring through the policies yesterday to see where things went wrong, you know what I mean? And what should have been done, what wasn't done. Did what happened fall underneath their scope of practice?" she said.

Violent past

Russell Blakney and Racheal Blakney had been married for 15 years, and Russell Blakney had a criminal record and a history of abusing his wife. In April 2016, Blakney was convicted in Wisconsin on charges of strangulation, battery, false imprisonment, intimidating a victim and disorderly conduct. In that incident, Blakney had beaten his wife, strangled her, held a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her and himself.

Oct. 19, 2023

Racheal said that the night before he killed his son, Russell Blakney threatened her life again.

"My husband and I had gotten into an argument about a friend. And he basically told me that I was no longer allowed to see this friend, that I was no longer allowed to go to church. The kids weren't allowed to associate with this family anymore," she said.

He didn't know it, but Racheal was planning on leaving him in January.

"But then… Thursday night happened… Normally I would have pleaded for 'please let me continue to be friends with this person, don't take church away, etc., etc.' Well, because I already knew, like, I'm done. There's just no point in this anymore. I think he realized like, 'OK, this is weird. She's not acting how she normally would. Something's going on.'" she said.

Russell Blakney had installed something on Racheal's phone that essentially allowed him to see any text messages she sent or received. She sent a friend a text, letting that friend know she was OK, and Russell read it.

That night, when they got into bed, he asked her about it.

Then, Racheal said, he got on top of her, threw her phone across the room, and put a gun to her head.

"He continued to put me up against the wall and held a gun to my throat and told me that he was going to kill me.  He even stated, 'Do you see how I'm not even shaking?' Like, he had no physiological response to what he was doing at all. Completely emotionless," she said. "This probably went on for 20 minutes or so with the gun held to me, and then eventually I got him to put the gun on the side of the bed, and him and I talked and had conversations about, like, what our life would look like moving forward. I got him to calm down completely."

The two went to bed.

Oct. 20, 2023

The next morning, Racheal got up, told her children goodbye, and went to work, all the while trying to figure out what to do.

"I left because I couldn't, like, safely execute any kind of plan being at home," she said. "I knew he was capable of killing. He had already tried to kill me in Wisconsin… But, like, I couldn't make phone calls. I couldn't do anything with him at home. So I went to work to try to figure out what am I going to do? How am I going to get us all out safely? I didn't know what he would do to me had I stayed home."

At work, Racheal, who works as a nurse practitioner, called her supervisor, letting her know she wouldn't be able to take patients that day. The supervisor texted her in response. Russell saw that text too, and he called her.

"He said he needed to go. He needed to prepare, that he wasn't going back to jail," she said.

She called 911, and shortly thereafter, officers from the Gaston County Police Department performed a welfare check. Russell Blakney brought the children to the door, and they were OK, Racheal said. The police left.

Then, Racheal Blakney went to the Gaston County Courthouse. She wanted to take out a restraining order against Russell, but there wasn't going to be a judge available to hear restraining order requests until noon.

"I'm like, I cannot wait two hours, like, I don't have two hours to wait," she said.

A police officer was present, and she appealed to him, but he seemed dismissive, she said.

She decided to fill out paperwork to have Russell involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment.

"The magistrate, after I hand wrote everything, accidentally shredded all of my information," she said.

She orally told the magistrate what had happened, and he approved the order.

At 2 p.m., she appeared before a judge, who granted her a protective order against Russell.

Then, she went to the Gaston County Sheriff's Office to give a statement to try to get orders for his arrest, but the original magistrate, who had already granted the involuntary commitment order, refused to order Russell's arrest because both an involuntary commitment order and a protective order existed, and those orders would remove Russell from the home, according to both Gaston County officials and Racheal.

The process, by that point, had taken most of the day. By the time the magistrate denied the order for arrest, it was after 4 p.m., Racheal said.

Racheal said that at the time, an officer at the Gaston County Sheriff's Office suggested she go into the house to retrieve her children.

She said that a captain texted her at 4:41 p.m.

The text read, "Are you safe? And are your kids safe?"

She said, "I don't have my kids."

After several text exchanges, Racheal said she called the officer and asked him what the plan was.

"And his response to me was, 'Y'all been married for 15 years? I figured you would have went back there,'" she said.

"I said, 'I don't know what you don't understand about being held at loaded gunpoint, but I have expressed to you that I have no intentions of going back to my house right now. I can't.' I said, 'So, what is our plan?'

She said that the man's response was that they didn't know yet.

"I think that it's important that all of law enforcement understands the process of abuse, and how it impacts the person involved," she added. "And I don't feel like they really knew, like they really understood that this is actually very normal for someone... to have a hard time leaving."

'Minutes too late'

Racheal Blakney says that law enforcement began showing up at the property between 6 and 7 p.m.

"At 5 p.m., my daughter reported to me that her father left the house, went outside with a bulletproof vest on and obtained the gasoline and came back into the home," she said. "So had someone been there, visualizing, they would have been able to see him leave the home."

An account from Gaston County states that the Gaston County Sheriff's Office showed up at the property shortly before 5:30 p.m., meeting Russell Blakney's father outside the home. Russell Blakney refused to surrender, and at 6:36 p.m., after "numerous calls and texts," a regional response team negotiator made contact with him, according to that same account. At 7:48 p.m., a magistrate issued warrants for Blakney's arrest on charges of false imprisonment, assault by pointing a gun and possession of a firearm by a felon.

By then, Racheal Blakney was sitting outside Riverside Fish House, where the Department of Social Services had told her to wait for her children.

Sometime after 7 p.m., she said, the negotiators asked her to speak with her husband.

"I was very uncomfortable talking to him because I knew what he was going to do, that he was going to try to persuade me to come back home and things like that. And I didn't want those conversations," she said.

At 9:55 p.m., according to Blakney, a regional response team took over negotiations entirely.

The account from Gaston County says that the team took tactical control of the situation at 10:20 p.m.

Racheal was asked to talk to her husband. She also was asked to draw diagrams of the home.

At 2:10 a.m., officers with the Gaston County Police Department were sent to the scene. According to a statement from Gaston County, the county police were involved in the investigation throughout the process, but the regional response team and the Gaston County Sheriff's Office stayed on the scene because the regional response team had already made contact with Blakney.

At 2:45 a.m., according to the county, Gaston County Police Department was transitioning control of the scene to their own emergency response team.

But soon tragedy would strike.

"At 2:59 in the morning, my sister-in-law received a text message from her brother indicating that the home was covered in gasoline and that she would see the kids again in heaven," Blakney said. "They did not enter or try to enter the home for 30 minutes."

At 3:36 a.m., according to the county, flames began shooting from the house.

An officer pulled Piper from a window.

"My daughter got herself positioned to be saved by the window, and the officer thrust himself through the window and pulled her out," Blakney said, speaking through tears. "Now without him, I mean, I would be childless. He did save her life. That officer that retrieved her saved her life.

"She asked, 'Where's my brother?' And he didn't know where the bedroom was. So she had to tell him where they could get him," she said. "Now, thankfully, thankfully, they went in and retrieved my son. You know, I mean, minutes too late. But they were at least able to retrieve his body."

Cyrus

Racheal is reminded of Cyrus every day.

When Piper, an avid swimmer, goes to swim, she remembers her son. The twins swam together, and Cyrus dreamed of competing in the Olympics.

"They were both top swimmers on the Gaston Gators for age group, both state level swimmers," Racheal said.

Cyrus was "a funny character, and so loving," Racheal added. "(He) always cared about other people, you know?"

The twins had been homeschooled since January 2023. Cyrus' favorite subject was "probably science."

"He really actually just loved to take breaks," she said. "And go for walks. It took me probably four months to realize that he was playing me."

She laughed.

"Because he knew that was like the way to my heart, was to just spend time with me, and so he would be like, '"Well we can go for a walk and then we can come back to school,'" she said.

She said that Cyrus often wanted her to sit with him as he did schoolwork, and she would show him that the answers were in his textbook.

"And so for probably about four months, I would physically turn to the page for him, and then show it to him, and finally one day he says, he goes, 'Mom, you know what?' He says, 'Do you know that all of the answers are in that book?'" Racheal said. "And I was like, 'Yes, Cyrus… you know where to find things.' I said it's not about what you know. It's, 'Do you know how to find the answer?'"

"And he was so hilarious, because he thought that, it was like, 'huh, I'm pulling one over on you.' And I was like, 'you have finally realized the key to what I've been trying to tell you for the last few months,'" she added.

Seeking answers

Racheal Blakney is trying to understand why negotiations failed. According to state public records law, the records of criminal investigations are not public, which has meant that obtaining information about the police response has been challenging.

After she filed a motion asking for the body camera footage in the case to be released, she said an attorney called her and offered to let her view the recordings. She said she didn't, but someone representing her did, as she felt viewing the footage herself would be emotionally difficult.

One of her chief questions is whether or not the departments involved in the negotiations followed their own policy.

"Because I don't have information, my perception could very well be skewed," she said.

She also wants to understand what happened for the sake of her 11-year-old daughter.

"My daughter lost her father, and she also lost her twin. She has questions too that I can't answer," she said. "If they did follow the policy and did what they were supposed to do, what needs to change?"

This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: 'Minutes too late:' Inside a mother's search for answers after her child's death