A mother of 5 slain children who attended the five-day death penalty trial of her ex-husband read a letter written to their eldest child at a South Carolina court on May 20.
“My babies! My babies! Oh, God! I’m so sorry!” Kyzer said, reading a letter she had written to one of her slain children, Merah Jones. She then collapsed on the witness stand, in the Lexington County courtroom.
Jones, an Intel computer engineer, faces the death penalty for killing the couple’s five children—Merah, 8; Elias, 7; Nahtahn, 6; Gabriel, 2; and Abigail Elaine, 1. For more than a week he randomly drove around the southeast with the dead bodies of the children in his SUV. He finally dumped them in a forest in the countryside Alabama.
Kyzer was the 26th prosecution witness. Deputy prosecutor Suzanne Mayes asked her to read a letter she wrote to Merah to apologize for her divorce from Jones.
“I felt it was my place to apologize for breaking hearts, for their broken home,” she testified, her voice choking up, reported The State.
She took a gasp for breath as she read the letter. She read: “Merah, my sweet, sweet daughter, I know that your heart feels heavy and you feel really sad. I want to reassure you, sweetheart, that you along with your brothers and sister mean everything to me. Mommy and Daddy were very blessed ...” Then she started to sob in agony.
The letter is evidence in the case. It read further: “It makes me sad to know that you are hurt so bad by what I have done, that you make me feel bad for your actions. You are not to blame for what I did Merah, I’m so sorry for leaving you in that house alone, Merah. I’m so sorry for making you feel scared and alone. I love you very much sweetheart, I will never ever leave you alone again Merah.”
During the proceedings, Mayes recalled for Kyzer how Kyzer and Jones had met in Chicago; their nine years of marriage; her last conversation with her son, Nahtahn; and then the conversation with Jones, who, in a rage, hung up before slaying their five children.
Jones was angry with Nahtahn for blowing up four electric outlets in the home. “I heard my son crying—my son Nahtahn—and I asked him what was wrong, and he said, ‘Mom, I didn’t mean to.’ And Tim was going on in the background, ‘You could have killed yourself, son!’ I was trying to calm my son down,” Kyzer said of the regular evening call she made to her kids on Aug. 28, 2014.
As the emotional drama unfolded in the courtroom, Judge Eugene Griffith stood and asked the jury to leave the room. Jones kept his face down as Kyzer continued to wail.
“Oh God! I’m so sorry. So sorry! Why? Why? Why?” her high pitched wailing continued for a minute.
Under the divorce decree, she was only allowed to see her children once a week on Saturdays at a Lexington Chick-fil-A restaurant, in Jones’s presence.
She’s currently married to Shawn Kyzer, with whom she has one daughter. The trial continued on Tuesday.
