Yvonne Cossio would have been 36 now, watching her kids learn to drive or get dolled up for prom.

Instead, her 55-year-old mother is raising them.

Carol Cossio looks across the living room and sees her dead daughter, Yvonne, alive in her grandchildren.

They have her smile, her dark chocolate eyes. "Sahrie has her personality, and Donte looks just like her," Cossio said.

Yvonne's kids were 3 and 4 when they witnessed 17-year-old Jerome Perea gun down their mother in the front yard of her Denver home in 1993. Donte ran to her and "tried to wake her up," Cossio said. Sahrie peered out on the crime scene from an upstairs window, not really understanding what was going on. It wasn't until Donte was 7 that he started having nightmares about what he'd seen.

"I think about (Perea) and I think what a coward to shoot a woman in the back and in front of her children," said George Cossio, one of Yvonne's brothers. "He never deserves to get out. I wish he could've gotten the death penalty."

Instead, Perea is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Yvonne, 24, befriended Perea, who was seven years her junior, and he fell in love with her.

When the teen realized the feelings weren't mutual, it began a downward spiral that led to her very public death.

To make matters worse, the Cossio family said, Perea never showed remorse at the trial.

Now, sitting in the Limon Correctional Facility, Perea said his decisions were based on rejection and immaturity.

"I think I'm at a time in my life now where I would be ready to talk to them," Perea said.

"I pray every night. I pray for my family. I pray for guidance. I pray for the victim's kids and their families."

Sahrie, 15, and Donte, 16, don't like talking about their mother or the man who killed her. For years they had to answer the dreaded question: "Where's your mother?"

"In heaven," they said when they were younger. Now they hold tight to pictures and stories - other people's memories.

Carol Cossio not only has her memories but her grandchildren as a constant reminder of the daughter who was taken from her. She is nervously anticipating an empty nest and realizes her days of having kids living at home are coming to an end.

For 36 years, she's been raising children - hers, then Yvonne's. The thought of being alone has stirred up dreadful feelings.

"There are nights I still wake up and cry for her," Carol Cossio said. "Lately I've been feeling very lonely and missing her."

She still cringes when she talks about Perea. Rarely does she call him by his first name. Typically, she just refers to Perea as "him" or "he."

"I'm frightened by him," she said. "I sure wouldn't want him out there walking the streets again."

Yvonne Cossio's family said prison is where Perea belongs.

"No normal person, young or old, is going to think about killing someone and actually do it," George Cossio said.

"I don't think anyone with that in their mind can be rehabilitated."