They Agreed to Meet Their Mother's Killer. - Then Tragedy Struck Again.

[LiberalArkie]

FILED 6:00 a.m.
07.21.2020

On Sept. 12, 2018, the five adult children of Debbie Liles waited in the prosecutor’s office in Jacksonville, Florida, to meet the man who one year earlier had bludgeoned their mother to death with a golf club.

Michelle, 38, had brought what she called her “madwoman” binder of colorfully highlighted police reports about the murder. Have you seen the crime-scene photos of our mom’s brain leaking onto her kitchen floor? she wanted to ask. Because we have. So you should too.

Sitting on a windowsill, Dana, 42, clutched a framed poster of a space shuttle that she planned to show the man. On the back, Debbie, a grandmother of eight, had written a note to one of Dana’s sons, who struggled with loneliness as a boy. “This picture makes me think of you so much,” she wrote, “a rocket shooting up to God.”

Their brother Gerald, 34, the philosopher of the family, sat thinking about a court document he’d read that detailed the perpetrator’s childhood. Repeatedly abandoned as a toddler with no food for days at a time. Found wandering on a highway at age 4. Sibling died in a house fire. Sexually abused, whipped with extension cords, placed in more than 20 different foster homes. Attempted suicide at age 13 because, he said, “nobody wanted him.” Gerald wanted to believe that this man was just broken, not beyond repair. Your life has value, he hoped to tell him.

Snip

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/07/21/they-agreed-to-meet-their-mother-s-killer-then-tragedy-struck-again

[Alliepoo]

1. So very sad.

[FM123]

2. A must read! Long article, but more than worth one's time...

This part really stood out for me:

"For Nelson, the case was a revelation. Without a trial or a death sentence, she’d met the wishes of a victim’s family, even if she could never fully repair their loss. Nelson began learning more about victim-offender dialogues and urged her staff to read the work of Danielle Sered, a pioneer in the “restorative justice” movement, which is gaining currency amid calls to upend America’s criminal-justice system in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. In 2008, Sered founded Common Justice, a Brooklyn-based organization that was the first in the nation to offer victim-guided alternatives to incarceration for adults charged with violent felonies such as assault and robbery, though not murder. With approval from the local prosecutor and court, her group brings victims and perpetrators together to agree on the damage done by a crime and how to fix it."

[pnwest]

3. Engrossing read. Wrenching. Thanks for posting.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

4. Amazing read. Thanks so much for posting it. K&R.

[chowder66]

5. This is a very good article, this paragraph struck me.

Broadly speaking, restorative justice can never be more than a partway measure to curtail violence, social-justice advocates argue, because, just like traditional prosecution, it happens after the fact. To eliminate the harm that we do to one another, they say, would require national investment in alleviating generational poverty often born of racial segregation and expanding mental-health and drug-addiction treatment, among other things. As Rachel Liles put it, “Restorative justice? Let’s have a country that doesn’t make an Adam Lawson in the first place.”