Tampa Bay Rays prospect Blake Bivens found out his wife and son, 1, were killed by brother-in-law on Facebook
Tampa Bay Rays pitching prospect Blake Bivens has revealed that he found out about the tragic news that his family had been murdered on social media. Bivens revealed he had been left devastated last August when he learned that his wife, Emily, his mother-in-law Joan, and his one-year-old son Cullen had been killed, but his faith had helped him get through those difficult times.
The 24-year-old had been with his team in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when he received a summons to come back home to Pittsylvania, Virginia. While waiting at the airport, he turned to social media for more information.
Sharing his experience at The River Church in Danville, Virginia, during a live-streamed event, he said, "First headline I see is two females and a small child were gone. I immediately knew that was them. I found out my family was gone over a Facebook headline. I just immediately began to scream in the middle of the airport."
"I think the hardest moment for me was when I got home and I walked in my son's bedroom for the first time and realized I was never going to see him on this Earth again," he continued. "That was the worst moment in my life. Nothing ever will come to being, to feeling the way I felt at that moment. Then again, I know I will see him again one day, and it won't be long."
Biven's 19-year-old brother-in-law Matthew Bernard was the perpetrator. After killing his family, Bernard fled the scene on foot, only to be apprehended three hours later in the parking lot of Keeling Baptist Church. He was fully nude at the time.
The teen was subsequently charged with three counts of first-degree murder, with a search warrant issued in September indicating that there may have been a religious motivation to his actions.
Nonetheless, Bivens said it was Bible verse John 16:33 that changed him and got him through the entire ordeal even as he was struggling to cope with the loss.
"And when I read, 'Take heart, for I have overcome the world,' it changed, it completely flipped a switch in my heart," he said. "And from that moment on I knew that this was not going to beat me, this was not going to beat family."
"I was going to live in victory the rest of my life, and I was going to use this as a testimony to show what he has done for me he can also do for others," he continued. "That moment for me was one of the biggest moments where I just knew God was with me, and the only thing I knew to do was just laugh in the enemy's face because he thought he had won."
"But all he's done is awoken a sleeping giant and as long as I'm here on this earth, every day I wake up my goal is to pile-drive him right in the face every morning when I get up."
With his family claiming that he suffers from a host of mental health problems, a competency review and determination hearing has been scheduled for Bernard next week to determine if he is capable of standing trial.