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Joy with sisters Marla (left) and Jeannie (middle). put us on the stand, but the questions the man’s lawyer asked were confusing. I realize now that he was trying to confuse my words even though I was only ten-years-old and had just lost my mama. When he tried to question Jeannie, she fell apart.” In June 1979, the man was charged with murder. An appeal was filed, and Joy and her sisters had to go through yet another trial. Joy returned to the Toombs County Court House recently for information on the trial and discovered letters sent by people in the community on the man’s behalf. “They wrote to ask for leniency. They made it sound as if the man was the victim, and not my mother. Not one person even mentioned the three little girls left behind in those letters to the Judge,” said Joy. In the second trial, the man once again insisted that the shooting had been an accident. “Our lawyer got a gun specialist. I remember him banging the gun on the jurors’ stand and saying that it wasn’t possible for the gun to go off by accident because the trigger had to be pulled back for it to fire.” The family was devastated when the man was given a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter. “We always believed it was because we didn’t have the kind of money for a bigtime lawyer,” said Joy. These are the memories of a ten-year-old child and the stories the family continues to tell at every gathering and birthday or anniversary of Linda Sue Jernigan’s passing. After the funeral, Joy’s hate for the man who shot her mother was only surpassed by the fear that she and her sisters would be separated. “My great-grandmother was old and frail. I just knew we weren’t going to be allowed to stay with her, but living with her in that house was all we’d ever known.” Thankfully, her mother’s younger sister Ann was able to take over guardianship of the girls, and she and her husband, Ricky Odom, raised them as their own. “They already had three children and one more after we went to live with them,” said Joy. “We com Th Th ma my ev gir to m th a g h j g 94 Toombs County Magazine LEFT Joy with her mother Linda Sue and sisters.


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