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Dennis McCarthy's column appears Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday.
When things get hectic and the stress of the day becomes hard to handle, Lori visits Nicole.
She'll sit with her daughter for an hour or more at Westlake Village cemetery, where Nicole is buried under the limbs of a large old oak tree.
Or, Lori visits the fountain sculpture and garden built in Nicole's memory in 1995, at Our Lady of Grace Catholic School in Encino where the child had been a student.
Either place is fine for Lori Parker-Gladstein. No amount of stress can stand up to the peace Nicole still gives her mother even now, nearly seven years after the little 8-year-old girl was murdered in one of the Valley's most brutal, grisly crimes.
Even the LAPD homicide detective who found Nicole's battered and bruised body - in a suitcase in the bedroom closet of Hooman Ashkan Panah, a neighbor of Nicole's father in a Woodland Hills apartment complex - was never the same again.
"It was a day I'll never forget, having to go outside and break the news to that poor family that we'd found their daughter's body," said Joel Price, who retired from the...