NEW ORLEANS – Dear Mom, this memorial year is hard.

Each October, Jasmine Groves holds a memorial service in honor of her late mother. Standing outside her modest Baton Rouge apartment on an unusually brisk morning for the Delta, Groves reads aloud a poem she wrote to mark the milestone.

My insides feel dead. I just want to go back to Alabo and be young again. And look at your beautiful face.

Her mother Kim was murdered by a hit man 20 years ago ­– a hit man hired by a New Orleans police officer. The story of the corruption that killed her is kept alive by her daughter, who was a day shy of 13 when she saw her mom for the last time.

“I went to answer the phone,” Groves said, clearing her throat. “A friend of hers was like, 'Kim just got shot. I think she's dead.'"

Groves rushed outside to find her mother on the ground at the corner, steps away from their home in New Orleans’ infamous Ninth Ward, with a gunshot to the head.

"The thing that was amazing [was] that even though the bullet had knocked her brains out, within her eyes you could see the soul of her saying, 'I'm sorry I have to leave you guys,'” she remembered.

Last month was Groves' 32nd birthday, the same age as her mother when she was gunned down. She has two children of her own now. And a smiling picture of her mother leans against the living room wall; Hurricane Katrina destroyed all the others.

I know God has a reason. He needed his angel. But for 20 years I have been empty.

New Orleans police officer Len Davis had Kim Groves killed for reporting to his department that he'd brutalized a kid in the neighborhood. Davis was recorded on a federal wiretap ordering Groves’ murder and celebrating when he learned she was dead. He was found guilty in 1996 and sentenced to death. But Davis remains alive on death row, and two decades later, Groves' family is still awaiting the outcome of a pending federal civil rights lawsuit.