A section of Marguerite Morris' living room wall is dedicated to her daughter Katherine.
It's been over 12 years since her death.
Morris hasn't given up the fight to prove her daughter didn't take her own life and is pushing for the case to be reopened.
"Why wouldn't someone want to know what happened to their loved one? Why don't I deserve to know if someone harmed my daughter and how they harmed my daughter," said Morris, sitting in her office littered with files from her daughter's case.
Katherine Morris was found dead in a parking lot in Anne Arundel County in 2012.
Charcoal grills lit in her car caused carbon monoxide poisoning.
"We were told that she committed suicide and we believed that. It was hard but our child was gone," said Morris.
Morris changed her opinion over time, suspicious of her daughter's husband.
She says that her daughter was the victim of military marriage fraud.
It's when a service member gets a sham marriage to reap the benefits of being married.
Military members receive increased pay for having more dependents from the marriage.
If they're found committing marriage fraud, they can be charged with fraud against the United States, which can carry a fine and even jail time.
"He didn't ask her to marry him, he ordered her to marry him," said Morris.
According to the police report, Katherine Morris found out her husband was cheating on her with several other women.
"She had actually notified them 72 hours before her death. She said the three individuals, the evidence, and she was going to go to the authorities on Monday and her body was found on Saturday," said Morris.
According to the police investigation, a classmate told officers Katherine had attempted to take her own life a year prior to her death.
Police even found what's believed to be a suicide note in Katherine's phone.
Ultimately, no one was charged in Katherine's case and police maintain that it's a suicide.
But a mother's persistence can't be broken by a police report.
Pushing for years, and eventually getting her daughter's death classification changed from suicide to undetermined. But this doesn't change the case status – it's still closed.
"So, they made the change in the determination, and again what was the most traumatic was coming back to the police and them refusing to cooperate. That was like pulling the rug out from us as a mother and a family because you try for a decade to get this correction, and now you have it, and they cross their arms and say we don't care we're not changing it," said Morris.
Now, over the last few years, Morris has been working to change policy to require that any death determined to be a suicide then overturned must be reopened.
"It did show us that we need to have something in place," said Morris.
This year, through a stubborn persistence and the help of bill sponsor, Delegate Sandy Bartlett, the Katherine Morris Death Reclassification Act passed both chambers and was signed by Governor Wes Moore.
"Is it going to give the families everything that they need, of course not, but the one thing the state could do was to make sure the case remained open and make sure that if there is something to investigate, the local officers would do the investigation as opposed to keeping it closed," said Delegate Bartlett, a Democrat from Anne Arundel county.
The new law isn't retroactive, so it won't force police to reopen Katherine's case, but may help someone else.
"We're not asking them to re-investigate. List it as unsolved, because perhaps someone down the road could be another agency will pick it up and wonder what happened to Katherine Morris."
Marguerite is still hopeful her daughter's case will be reopened.
We reached out to the Anne Arundel County police department for a comment on this case.
We were told the department cannot comment because there is pending litigation in the case.
Marguerite has a hearing on September 30 asking a judge to force the department to change the case to unsolved.
Local News
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