A year after boat crash, Mallory Beach’s dad remembers her as one who helped others

This story first published Feb. 23. 2020.

Phillip Beach looks at his bow and arrows, equipment for a sport he used to love. His bow hangs next to the one he gave his youngest daughter, his hunting partner, when she was 13.

So many memories.

So many painful reminders that Beach, 54, faces daily since daughter Mallory Beach’s death a year ago in a boat crash near Parris Island.

“It is a nightmare,” Phillip Beach said. “We live it again and again.”

He remembers the day she asked for a bow and arrow. She had started hunting with him as a small child, armed with a youth rifle, but when she became a teenager, she was ready for a challenge.

“She said, ‘Daddy, I want to shoot a deer with a bow because it is too easy with a gun,’” he recalled. “She wanted that challenge. She was determined she could do it.” The two went together to pick out her bow.

The first year, she missed a couple of deer.

“Then she went out and she killed two,” he said. “I was so proud of her.”

He smiles at another memory: “She loved to climb trees when hunting.” He always tied her off with a harness, just to be safe, but “she wasn’t afraid of heights.”

Beach cherishes those moments, but they make carrying on without her that much harder.

“She made me so proud of her. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to even hunt any more. Because I don’t have her with me.”

He remembers his last conversation with his 19-year-old daughter — the night of the boat crash.

That Saturday, he had driven her car to an auto shop in Charleston for repairs. “I ... told her that they had to keep her car overnight and over the weekend,” he said.

“That was the last time I talked to her.”

Every day since Feb. 24 has been hard.

“At some point in the day something will spark me thinking of her,” he said. “I get emotional, and I just have to be by myself.”

People remember Mallory Beach, the youngest of Beach’s three daughters, for loving and rescuing animals. A nonprofit, Mal’s Palz, has been established in her name to collect money for the Hampton County Animal Shelter.

Mallory, a 2017 Wade Hampton High School graduate and soccer player, spent a semester at the University of South Carolina. She had been planning to attend University of South Carolina Beaufort, but at the time of the crash, she was working at It’s Retail Therapy boutique in Beaufort.

Beach appreciates the stories people have shared about his daughter.

One day he walked into a convenience store, and a woman there recognized him.

“Her child was in class with Mallory,” he said, retelling the story. “She said, ‘Are you Mr. So and So?’”

She told Beach that her son had gone to high school with Mallory.

“No one would talk to him, and everyone picked on him, and Mallory told him, ‘It was going to be ok,’” her father recalled the woman saying. “She spent time with him.”

That’s who Mallory was, he said. She cared about people. She didn’t want to see anyone suffering. “Anyone who was pushed to the side — she cared for them. ... She would tell me about them,” Beach said. She had “a soft spot in her heart.

“That’s how she was raised. We raised her not to hate.”

Criminal charges against the driver of the boat, and a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Mallory’s mother, Renee, against the driver’s family and others, are pending. Neither has been scheduled for trial.

“I’ve forgiven those ones who wronged me,” Beach said. “We want justice at the same time. We don’t want our daughter’s life taken in vain.”

Beach said he and his former wife — they divorced when Mallory was a child — have turned over all evidence to attorneys. They know that what happens now is in God’s hands.

“When we hear negative things, we pray,” Beach said. “We want all darkness drug into the light.”

The family is grateful for the prayers and support from the community. Those prayers, and their trust in God, help the family continue, Beach said.

Mallory, her father said, knew the Lord, and that makes all the difference.

In her room hangs a chalkboard on which she scrawled a reminder: “Be strong in the Lord and never give up hope.”

It’s the first thing he sees when he walks into her room.

“I know where my little girl is,” he said. “That is what gives me the strength to carry on.”

This story was originally published February 23, 2020 at 6:30 AM.