instincts can be a powerful thing. Alice claims that, around the first week of September, 2001, she became almost frantic to find LaShondra. When she insisted on seeing the little girl, Connie told her that she’d put LaShondra into a psychiatric facility. Alice demanded to visit LaShondra and Connie agreed.
But on the day they were supposed to visit the facility, Alice pounded on Connie’s door and found the house completely empty.
The family—Connie Knight, her common-law husband, Raymond Jefferson, Jr. and her children—had fled in the night. No one in the family had heard from them. No one knew where they were. At that point, Alice’s own mother passed away and she didn’t have time to worry about a daughter who tended to pick up and leave whenever things got too hot for her.
Using Jefferson’s employment records, Sgt. Douglas traced the family to Louisiana, where they had been living since LaShondra’s death.
All three of the surviving children, ages four, thirteen and sixteen, who lived in the home with Connie and Raymond, denied ever even having seen LaShondra. When Sgt. Douglas showed a photograph of LaShondra in happier days to the thirteen-year-old, she started to shake—violently—from head to foot, but maintained that she had not seen LaShondra. The children each swore, adamantly, that they did not even have a sister.
Raymond swore he didn’t even know the girl and for several hours, Connie maintained LaShondra was still in Georgia with relatives.
So Sgt. Douglas showed them Jefferson’s employment records, in which he’d claimed LaShondra as a dependent, and witness statements from Houston neighbors that there had been “another child” who was not allowed outdoors. He showed them photographs of the blue fleece blanket and he showed them photographs of the closet from their house in Houston, the one with human feces smeared on the walls and floor.
Finally, Connie cracked. At first, she confessed that she had been responsible for LaShondra’s death and she was arrested. The children became hysterical and refused to speak, not to police, not to social workers, not to counselors, not to anyone. In his calm, reassuring way, Sgt. Douglas left word that, when they were ready to talk, he was ready to listen.
After several weeks, Sgt. Douglas’s patience was rewarded. He was contacted by family members who told him that the girls were finally ready to talk. They admitted that, although both parents had been horribly abusive to their sister, it had been Raymond who had killed her.
Confronted with her children’s truth-telling, Connie changed her story. Although he continued to deny even knowing LaShondra, ultimately, Raymond Jefferson, Jr. was charged with injury to a child, failure to stop her mother from abusing her and denying her proper medical attention. Connie was also charged with injury to a child. They were both jailed in Harris County.
Family members, filled with shame, rage, guilt and grief, buried the tiny girl, giving her, at long last, the funeral that Clarence Douglas and Darcus Shorten had so longed for. The detectives attended the service. On the funeral program, above a smiling and happy picture of a younger LaShondra, were printed the words from the Twenty-third Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil...”
Weeping relatives said a few words about how LaShondra had to die because “God needed another flower in His garden.”
But little “Angel Doe” did not have to die; nobody should ever have to die the way she did.
The rest of the story, when Clarence and Darcus finally pieced it all together, was grim.
Because she’d been ripped from the only home she’d ever really known, where she was loved, and thrown into a house full of strangers thousands of miles away, LaShondra did not behave like the adoring daughter her mother and Raymond thought she should be.
So they threw the little girl in a closet.
And left her there.
She was not permitted to leave the closet to go to the bathroom, but when she soiled herself or used the closet floor, she was terribly, horribly punished. And she was starved by her morbidly obese mother.
The other children were told that LaShondra was “crazy” and to leave her alone, but at night or when her parents were out of the house, the thirteen-year-old daughter would sneak LaShondra out of the closet and feed her or creep past and throw parts of her own meals into the closet—LaShondra’s only food.
Sometimes the girl slipped her brother’s training potty into the closet to help out her sister. On cold nights, she let LaShondra slide in under the covers and sleep with her, but they had to hurry her into the closet very early the next morning, because if Connie found them out, she would beat LaShondra.
LaShondra was never enrolled in school. She was not allowed outdoors. She was repeatedly hit, kicked and burned with cigarettes by both her parents.
When LaShondra’s sister asked her mother why LaShondra had to stay in the closet, Connie only said, “Because she doesn’t know how to act,” or, “because that’s where I want her to stay.”
All the children were forced to keep the secret from their grandmother.
On the night of September 7, 2001, little LaShondra said or did something that Raymond didn’t like and he kicked her so hard that she fell back onto the heater, cracking her skull, and began “to shake all over,” said the sisters in trial testimony. Raymond went to the store and brought back some ice, but nothing helped. Finally, he and Connie told the children that they were taking LaShondra to the hospital.
When their sister did not return, Raymond ordered the children never to speak her name again or “I’ll take you to the same place I took her.”
During her testimony at the trial, the closest sister suddenly put her face in her hands, threw back her head and keened with grief so wrenching that District Judge Mary Lou Keel stopped the proceedings.
In a dull monotone, Connie testified that Raymond made her drive him and the blanket-wrapped child to a secluded spot. While she waited in the car, he took the little girl into his arms and walked some distance from the car. “Then,” Connie testified, “I heard a splash.”
Other than that, the only other things she would say on the stand were, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t remember.”
In an agonizing jury deadlock, the first trial of Raymond Jefferson was declared a mistrial. Eleven of the jurors wanted to convict him, but one was not entirely convinced that Connie had not killed the child herself, as she originally claimed.
But prosecutors Casey O’Brien and Sylvia Escobedo would not be deterred. Within a few weeks, they mounted a second trial.
After all we’d been through with our little Angel Doe, I couldn’t stand not being there myself this time. When a witness canceled a composite sketch appointment and rescheduled it for later, I grabbed my purse and headed for the courthouse.
At the trial’s final proceedings, as I sat in the spectator gallery, I could see Raymond Jefferson in profile and I studied him. He was a big man, six feet tall and weighing more than 200 pounds. He had fists like cement blocks. I kept thinking about what those brutal fists had done to that child’s face and it was all I could do not to throw up.
But his face? His face was bland.
The thing is, when you see a monster like him in court, you expect him to look, well, like a monster.
But
