By Hannah Barricks
Photography by Moch Snyder Photography
The night Kimmie (maiden name Lov) met Mitchell Ellis, a storm was rolling across Fort Worth.
Kimmie was at a local police station, preparing for a ride-along as a civilian guest during an officer’s nightly patrol. Her father, Sonny Lov, a Dallas police officer, had died in the line of duty when she was 4 and decades later, she was searching for understanding and a glimpse of the work that had defined him.
Mitchell, then a Fort Worth police officer, immediately noticed her presence. When calls came in, he volunteered as backup — not by chance.
“I just wanted to be where she was,” he recalls.
The shift was a standard one, including a routine shooting call and a hospital run. Later, at a domestic disturbance, Mitchell handed Kimmie his flashlight as they searched a yard for tossed car keys. By the end of the night, rain was coming down hard and Kimmie hesitated to drive home alone.
Mitchell offered to follow her part of the way, but as he merged onto U.S. 287, panic set in — he hadn’t gotten her number. Then his phone buzzed. Kimmie had beaten him to it, grabbing his number from a mutual friend.
They’ve been together ever since.
Their relationship moved quickly — five months to engagement, five more to marriage — but marriage itself was anything but easy. Kimmie carried an unspoken fear shaped by her father’s death. Mitchell brought the realities of police work into their home.
“Every time I put on my uniform, we fought,” he says. “I didn’t understand it at first.”
Healing came through community and courage. A retreat with Concerns of Police Survivors introduced Kimmie to others who shared her loss. Standing together at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., seeing her father’s name etched in stone, something changed.
“Things that stayed buried finally had space to surface,” Mitchell says.
Kimmie’s story is also inseparable from her family’s survival. Her parents were Cambodian refugees who endured genocide under the Khmer Rouge, met again after years of separation, reuniting across continents — Paris, France to Odessa, Texas — before building a life that eventually led to Kimmie’s birth.
The Ellises’ wedding reflected that legacy: a 22-hour Cambodian ceremony with multiple outfit changes and traditions they carefully layered alongside those more familiar to Mitchell.
Although reality set in quickly afterwards, the couple found their calling in the struggle. After years of infertility, the Ellises began hosting annual “vision retreats” for couples — intentional weekends centered on honesty, faith and planning a shared future. What started as a small farmhouse retreat in Glen Rose grew into something larger.
Today, they are co-founders of La Palmilla, a boutique hotel and retreat space on the Brazos River, complete with a chapel that serves churches, nonprofits, and couples seeking restoration. What started as personal healing has become communal.
“We didn’t set out to build a business,” Mitchell says. “We set out to help people.”
Their love story is not one of ease, but of endurance — proof that love, when tended carefully, can become something that heals far beyond itself; and that a “love story” needn’t follow any one blueprint so long as the heroes find each other in the end.