Family remembers slaying victim as good mother
Family remembered April Lynn Lincoln as a loving mother to her 2-year-old daughter, and although she had a drug addiction, she was receiving help. “April was a good person, soft-hearted and she spent all of her time with her little girl,” mother Donna Leadbeater Lincoln said in a phone interview Sunday evening, struggling to hold back a flood of tears. “She was a good mother and was always with her baby. That’s what she was about: her and her baby.”
Lincoln said April Lincoln loved children, most of all her beloved 2-and-a-half-year-old Jamie Lynn Rankin, for whom she took full responsibility.
She walked, swam and played with her daughter, and more recently, she took her daughter to the Uniontown Church of the Nazarene with Jamie’s grandmother and grandfather. They sang and spent time together at church, Donna Lincoln said.
“We planted that seed in her,” Lincoln said. “We took her to church all of the time. We were happy together. Jamie was with her all of the time.”
The 20-year-old was found dead in a wooded area near Coffey Street Wednesday, and police charged Eric Lee Bowser of Hopwood with criminal homicide for her death.
Her uncle, Keith Leadbeater of Smithfield, said the family is struggling to cope with the unexpected tragedy, and to find answers to many unanswered questions.
“We’re just trying to bury our niece and there is a lot of anger and a lot of questions,” he said Sunday. “No 20-year-old deserves to be beat to death.”
Leadbeater said the family wants to put a face to the man accused of killing Lincoln and allow everyone to know that she had a good family behind her, supporting her.
“We’re going to need closure and that’s going to help us,” Leadbeater said.
Bowser, said Leadbeater, was “a complete stranger, and not a friend of the family’s who we needed to get her (April) away from.
“She didn’t deserve what happened to her or the situation she was in,” he said.
April Lincoln was released from drug rehabilitation, where she committed herself, about three weeks prior to her family reporting her missing to police, Donna Lincoln said.
“She was trying to get her life back on track,” said Keith Leadbeater. “She was a good mother, a beautiful mother to her baby.”
The mother added that it was unlike her daughter to be gone for such a long period of time. April Lincoln would sometimes go out with friends, but would return the same night, Donna Lincoln said.
“She would always come back home,” Donna Lincoln said.
April Lincoln attended the Fayette County Fair, tickled that it was in town, her mother said, and had plans to take Jamie to Idlewild next week and her cousin and niece to Kennywood.
“She would help anybody and do anything,” Donna Lincoln said. “She didn’t deserve to die, to be killed.
“‘Mom, I’ll be back,’ were her last words to me,” Donna Lincoln said through tears. “This time, she never did come back. Those monsters took her away from me. …The way they killed her. We can’t even have an open casket.
“It’s unreal,” she continued. “Why did they have to kill her?”
It’s hard, Donna Lincoln said, but she is trying to understand that God had a reason to take her daughter.
Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Dean C. Whitmarsh of Fairchance.