When Aleisha Brown was 8-years-old, her mother Shawntae packed her 7-year-old brother and their newborn sister in the car and drove from their home in Oklahoma City to Texas so they could see their father graduate from basic training.

It was already a magical experience, Aleisha tells PEOPLE, but it became a truly memorable trip when her mother and father Joshua surprised everyone by revealing that they would be getting married.

“He was in his [military uniform] and I just remember her being so happy,” Aleisha says of her mother.

Shawntae also told her children how much she loved them, Aleisha says, before pulling her daughter aside so that the two could speak privately for a moment.

“It was so weird because she told me this specifically by myself, she said: ‘Even if, for whatever reason, even though me and your dad love each other very much, if we don’t stay married or something happens, I will always love you guys and always choose you guys first.'”

That is Aleisha’s favorite memory of her mother, who seven years later in 2020 expressed that same sentiment to her oldest daughter with her dying breath.

“She told me she loved me,” Aleisha says.

By that point, Shawntae had endured 24 hours of nonstop physical abuse at the hands of her husband, Aleisha says.

She knows this because she and her siblings were in the house the entire time, confined to their room as Aleisha and her brother, who were 15 and 14 at the time, did their best to shield their younger sister, then 7, from what was happening just a few feet away.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

Things had not started out like this, Aleisha recalls.

After living the first 11 years of her life in a home that was free of abuse, Joshua returned home from his deployment in Afghanistan around 2016 a changed man, says his daughter.

“He was definitely more aggressive, he was definitely more irritable, angry. And after that is when the abuse started getting bad, because I mean, it was never abuse before then,” Aleisha says. “It would always be verbal arguments up until about 2016, when the abuse started with my mom.”

Aleisha says that while her father did not abuse her or her siblings, living with him was not easy.

“It was literally walking on eggshells. A constant hostile environment,” Aleisha says of her life at home, adding that the family lived cut off from their relatives at her father’s insistence.

It was after Joshua got caught cheating that Aleisha says things took an even darker turn inside the home.

He “started getting more paranoid,” Aleisha says, which is why she believes he wanted to start monitoring his wife and three children at all times. “That’s when he installed cameras in the house, so we were constantly under surveillance. He was listening to our conversations, watching us do everything.”

If Joshua believed Aleisha or one of her siblings had “done anything, weird or suspicious at all” there would be hours of questioning, she says, adding that she imagines the punishment was far worse for her mother.

“She didn’t want us to know,” Aleisha says of her mother, who she says never told her children that she was being abused by their father.

Aleisha believes this is why she has such conflicting feelings about him.

“I think back and I’m like, okay, well, I still see signs. I still see things that happened back then that maybe I was just too young and [my mother] was trying to hide from us and didn’t want us to know. So a part of me still thinks he was a good father, but then I wonder how much of that was real and how much was [my mother] just trying to portray him like that to me?” Aleisha opines.

It was four years after Aleisha first became aware of the abuse that her father went too far and fatally beat Shawntae to death on Sept. 30, 2020.

Shawntae was just 34 at the time.

Aleisha and her siblings were there for it all, she says, doing their best not to listen as their father beat their mother for 24 hours.

“He would have these, these episodes, and this was an episode,” Aleisha says.

There would always be a trigger, she says, and on that day it was a curtain in her brother’s room combined with her father’s paranoid and completely unfounded belief that Shawntae had been cheating on him in pornographic videos, according to Aleisha.

“That’s when it clicked and he shut off completely, it’s no longer my dad,” Aleisha says.

She says that for the next 24 hours she listened to her mother saying “no” and “trying to de-escalate” the situation. Aleisha says that she and her brother also started “trying to de-escalate” to no avail.

“That night was just especially hard because it was so bad. It was definitely the worst one we’d heard. It was definitely the worst one we’d been through,” Aleisha recalls.

Then, after 24 hours, Aleisha says her father summoned her to his room and ordered her to clean up her mother.

“I’m in the middle of cleaning her off in the bathtub and unfortunately she’s going in and out,” Aleisha says.

Her father on the other hand is “getting mad because she’s going in and out,” Aleisha says.

Then, his demeanor suddenly changed, according to his daughter.

“He switches as soon as he realizes she’s not okay and he’s done something messed up and now it’s too far. That’s when the switch happened,” Aleisha says.

Joshua told his daughter to call 911, but Aleisha says she could not tell the emergency responder what had actually happened to her mother.

“He told me to lie and tell them that she overdosed and took too many pills and came home and got f—ed up coming home. Not that he did it, not anything like that. Nothing to do with him having done anything,” Aleisha says.

Paramedics were quick to arrive, but Shawntae was declared dead at the scene, having died in the arms of her firstborn.

“I kind of feel selfish that I feel this way, but I’m glad that she died in my arms. It’s somewhat comforting to me.” Aleisha says.

A few hours later, Aleisha and her siblings were suddenly orphans, with police taking their father into custody.

“The very last thing he said to me, before asking me to get his vape, was telling me to take care of my siblings,” Aleisha recalls

It was a dark day that lingered for five years, Aleisha says, until last week when her father and prosecutors agreed to a plea deal that saw him plead guilty to first-degree murder and three counts of child abuse in exchange for the state agreeing to recommend a sentence of four lifetimes without the possibility of parole as opposed to the death penalty.

It was not prosecutors or her father who made that deal happen though, says Aleisha.

“I hate to say this, but I think it is what my mother would have wanted, and I do think that she had her hand in this somehow,” Aleisha says. “I know at the end of the day, she would still love him and give him another chance at life, and I really do think that is why I think this happened.”

Aleisha wonders how she would have made it through that time had she not had the values Shawntae instilled in her three children.

Shawntae had big dreams, says her daughter, and hopes of one day becoming a doctor.

Her hopes and dreams changed, however, at the age of 18, when Shawntae learned that she and her high school sweetheart Joshua were going to have a baby — Aleisha.

“Selfless is really what she was. She never once, you know, put it in our face that, ‘Oh, I didn’t go to [college] because of y’all.’ She always told us, ‘I made this decision for the best of y’all, for the best of me and our family, and I want y’all to know that I love y’all, and I would do this 100 times over,'” Aleisha says.

Despite facing a number of personal battles in the wake of her mother’s death, Aleisha is now fulfilling her mother’s biggest dream even though she is not here to witness it firsthand.

“Going to college is always something my mom wanted for me,” Aleisha says, who is currently in her second year at Rose State College in Arkansas, where she is majoring in media and communications.

And five years after her passing, Shawntae is still her daughter’s biggest role model.

“I hope to show her selflessness, her love, and her passion. She was just the best mom, and I could say this over and over and over, but she really was,” Aleisha says.

She adds: “When I smile, I try to imitate her smile.”