PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — In June, Andrew Hathaway was there as his mother married his father.
“As he’s walking me down the aisle, he is so worried I’m going to trip over my dress,” Morgan Bennett told KOIN 6 News.
But about 2 months later, in the early morning hours of September 5, he was found murdered inside the trunk of a burning Chevy Impala on North Marine Drive. So far, no one has been arrested.
“I miss him. I have no answers,” she said. “I live day by day. I’m empty without him. I’m lost without him.”
On Saturday, his family plans to hang up 400 fliers around Portland, especially near the MAX train, asking anyone with information to come forward. They want the killer — or killers — caught and brought to justice.
Andrew texted his mom 2 days before he died and said he loved her and he was fine.
Morgan Bennett doesn’t know why someone would murder her son, but she wants answers.
“They had to have been very angry people. You just don’t stab somebody multiple times and them put them in the trunk of a car and drive them somewhere and light the car on fire,” she said.
She admitted her son “was troubled in some areas,” but she made him laugh. He battled a heroin addiction but the family said he’d recently gotten clean. He was excited about living life.
Chris Bennett and his son recently reconnected. But now he laments that he never got to do all the things he wanted to do.
“I wanted to take off and go fishing with him and camping and stuff,” Chris Bennett said. “He didn’t deserve getting murdered or any of this.”
The Impala belonged to Andrew Hathaway’s on-again/off-again girlfriend, Nikki Janke.
“It was just an extra car and he was using it for the time being,” she told KOIN 6 News. She didn’t know where he was that night.
“Out with friends I would guess,” she said, “or people who he thought was his friends.”
She’s said she’s sad and thinks about him a lot.
“It just sucks because he was just changing his life around.”