Prentiss was born the youngest of three to Noble and Belle Vaughn, joining the family nine years after the birth of her sister, Paxton, and twelve years after her brother, Pate. Why there was such a gap between her and her siblings, Prentiss could only guess. Her siblings often teased that she had been an accident, but she didn’t care. She was the baby, and as thus, she seemed to get more attention from both her parents, something she both loved and hated.
Growing up in Reidville, South Carolina wasn’t exactly the most exciting of things. Weekends were spent outside playing sports or riding horses. The only thing akin to “entertainment” was the town’s bowling alley and Reidville families only went there for special occasions. Prentiss grew up listening to her father’s stories of his time in the US Marines and was kept even more captivated by his tales of justice, valor, and dedication that came with being a police detective like he had been at the time. And strangely enough, she loved every moment of it.
She and her family were extremely close, even despite the age difference between her and her siblings. Her brother left home to join the Marines when she was six and her sister went off to college on academic scholarship when Prentiss was ten, but despite all of this, they couldn’t be a closer family. Pate and Paxton came back home whenever they could and were always in constant contact when they were away.
Prentiss did pretty well in school, more so in middle than high school. In fact, she skipped fifth grade all together and was a mainly A/B student until she hit seventh grade. It was then that she began acting out. At first, her parents thought it was because she felt left behind without her siblings being at home, but it soon began to become clear that something else was wrong.
In the middle of tenth grade, Prentiss’ behavior hadn’t changed and in fact, had gotten a whole lot worse. She had started with just attitude issues –outbursts of anger, depression, anxiety, lack of motivation–, but after she turned fourteen, she started with drinking and then got into drugs, and ultimately started running away.
Noble and Belle felt they had no choice but to do some sort of intervention. They sent Prentiss to Aspen Ranch, a residential treatment center for trouble teens in Utah. There she was helped via a number of therapeutic methods including individual and group therapy, and equine and recreational therapy. It was there that she really began to excel at horseback riding and soccer, and it was then that the reason as to why she had been acting out came to light. She confessed to her therapist, and later to her parents, that their long-time neighbor, Kenneth Dennings, had been molesting her since the age of ten.
She left Aspen Ranch after roughly eleven months and returned to James F. Byrnes High School where her love of sports ultimately took precedent over everything else. Her grades weren’t the best and she soon discovered that the only way she was going to get out of Reidville was on an athletic scholarship, and that was exactly what she did. She played every sport her school offered, but excelled mostly at soccer, all she had learned at Aspen Ranch helping her greatly. Her skills got her a full-ride scholarship to the University of South Carolina.
Like many new college students, at first Prentiss wasn’t sure what she wanted to major in. She flip-flopped from Criminal Justice to Theatre to Russian to Social Work before she finally settled on Journalism and Communications. She found that she had a knack for both and was intent on either becoming a reporter or some sort of press liaison for some government agency or another.
She graduated with her bachelors in Journalism and her masters in Mass Communication, thus ending her college career in the spring of 2004. She was in the process of looking for a job in her field when she received word from her mother that her father had been murdered by his arch nemesis, Arnold Maddock, who he had put behind bars years before, but had somehow managed to get early parole. The Vaughn family knew it had been him who had killed their father, but they had no proof, no weapon, nothing. Prentiss’ rage about the lack of police action in the case spurred her into taking a completely different direction with her life. Instead of getting a job in something to do with everything she had just spent the past six years in college working for, she decided to become a cop. Her family was not exactly thrilled by the decision.
Prentiss headed to New York after coming to the conclusion that if she was going to be a cop, she wanted to be the best and who is more well known than the NYPD? Strangely enough, her sister and her niece, Hallie, were already living in New York as well and Prentiss was able to stay with them while she attended the Police Academy. She made it through and after almost two years of being a patrol officer, was accepted into the K9 Handler course which she passed with flying colors.
Her partner became a large Dogue de Bordeaux, also known as a French Mastiff, named Bruin. The pair trained in most everything including standard patrol, narcotics, explosives, arson, and even cadavers. Bruin is a pretty easygoing and friendly dog when off duty, but when he’s working, he’s all business. Prentiss couldn’t have asked for a more loyal partner.
Prentiss, Paxton, Hallie, and Bruin all stayed in the same small NYC apartment until they got word from some sources that Arnold Maddock had headed to the West Coast and was apparently hiding out in California. Determined to keep an eye on him, and ultimately find him guilty of their father’s murder, the sisters decided that they would head to the West Coast, too.
They wanted to stay as close as possible, and Prentiss wanted to make sure Bruin would be able to come with her as well. The only place they could make that happen was in Sierra Falls, and that’s exactly where they went. After Prentiss put in a special request in to have Bruin bought by the SFPD and transferred with her, a few weeks later, she, Paxton, Hallie, and Bruin all made the big move to Sierra Falls.
Prentiss just recently rescued two previously abused horses –a palomino Thoroughbred cross named Horatio and an Appaloosa mare named Shelby. She was boarding them out at a farm in Pineville, but things were beginning to get a little pricey for her salary. She almost had to return them to the rescue when Detective Sergeant Nicola Murphy-Steele offered to let her board them at her and her husband’s ranch for a far more reasonable price. Prentiss goes out there to see and work with the horses whenever she has a free minute.
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