Jury returns verdict in stalking case against ex-boyfriend of missing Columbus mother
A Columbus jury has found Malcolm Jamaine Jackson guilty of assault and stalking charges stemming from a domestic dispute with missing mother of three Ebony Giddens, three days before she disappeared.
The jury deliberated two hours on Wednesday, returned at 9 a.m. Thursday, and in three minutes announced it had reached a verdict.
Judge Arthur Smith III set Jackson’s sentencing for 10 a.m. Friday. Now 30 years old, Jackson faces a maximum 35 years in prison.
He was tried on charges of aggravated assault, aggravated stalking and using a gun to commit a crime. He was accused of putting a pistol to Giddens’ head on March 9, 2018, and of violating court orders by repeatedly contacting her when he got out of jail the next day.
March 9, 2018, was a Friday. Jackson, charged that night only with simple assault involving family violence, repeatedly called and texted Giddens the following Saturday and Sunday. Her brother discovered her missing at 7:30 a.m. Monday, March 12, when he came to take her sons to school.
No one has seen or heard from her since, despite her family’s offering a $10,000 reward for information on her whereabouts.
“For the past 19 months, this family has been worrying and wondering about Ebony,” prosecutor Wesley Lambertus said after the verdict. “The least that we could do was go forward with the charges that he’s currently facing. The evidence was pretty clear.”
That evidence showed Jackson’s abuse was not isolated to one weekend in March 2018, Lambertus said.
“Ebony, as the evidence showed, put up with quite a bit of abuse,” he said. “It wasn’t just that Friday night, March 9, and it wasn’t just the two days after he was released from the jail, with him violating the bond condition. There was ample evidence that he did this repeatedly, over several months.”
This was a shocking revelation to Giddens’ family, in whom she had not confided.
“The fact that the whole time Ebony had been going through this, and none of us knew, I think that affected us a lot,” said Chernda Pendleton, Giddens’ aunt. “The stuff that she endured, it hurts still that we couldn’t do nothing about that.”
Jealousy, obsession
“This case is only about one person — it’s about Ebony,” Lambertus told jurors in his closing argument Wednesday.
He said Jackson was obsessed with Giddens’ relationship with ex-boyfriend Roderick Daniel, with whom Giddens had two sons. Jackson claimed without evidence that the couple’s youngest son was not Daniel’s, even asking on Facebook what his friends thought of a woman who wouldn’t admit having a child by another man.
“I think Malcolm Jackson hates Roderick. I think that’s quite apparent in this case,” Lambertus said.
It was apparent to Giddens’ family, who noted Jackson’s continually focusing on Daniel, as he acted as his own attorney with advice from public defender Angela Dillon.
Jackson in his closing argument blamed Daniel for the events leading to his prosecution, claiming Daniel lied on the witness stand during Jackson’s trial, and in 2018 persuaded Giddens to lie on Daniel’s behalf and to fabricate the report resulting in Jackson’s arrest.
“During the whole trial, he made it about Roderick Daniel,” Pendleton said after Thursday’s verdict. “Not one time did he really make it about Ebony, and the fact that he stalked her, he abused her, and she is missing today.”
Said Daniel: “He was stuck on what happened with me and him, which had nothing to do with this case that we were here for. It just showed then how much jealousy he had for me.”
Lambertus told jurors this festering issue drove Jackson to assault Giddens on March 9, when Jackson demanded to know whom was communicating with her on her cell phone, and became so enraged he pulled a gun, put to the side of her head, and said he would blow her ear off.
Giddens around 10:30 p.m. surreptitiously texted police Sgt. Joe Jackson, whom she had befriended, and asked that he have officers respond without sirens. “He just put a gun to my head,” she wrote. “I’m not playing.”
While arresting Jackson for simple assault, police confiscated a pellet pistol he said he put to Giddens’ ear, but they never showed the gun to Giddens to confirm it was the right one, Lambertus said, and later texts showed the gun Jackson used was hidden in a closet, and Jackson, after he was released from jail, went into Giddens’ apartment and took it.
Around 10 p.m. that Saturday, March 10, Giddens texted Jackson and threatened to call the police, “because you’ve been in my house.... You went through my stuff looking for that gun.”
He replied, “You had me locked up once for you s—t already.”
Giddens’ apartment had a metal front door only someone with a key could access. In texts to Daniel, she wrote that she thought she had got her keys back from Jackson, but feared he had made copies.
“How did he get into the apartment to take the gun unless he had the keys?” Lambertus asked jurors.
Vanished
Two of Giddens’ cousins testified they had a three-way call with her the night of March 11, to ask why Giddens had Jackson arrested. They found her to be uncharacteristically evasive, giving them one-word answers to their questions, until one asked whether Jackson had pointed a gun at her.
“If you already know the answer, why do you keep asking these questions?” she replied.
Lambertus recounted that testimony in his closing, suggesting Giddens was reluctant to talk because Jackson was there listening: “It could be that he’s in the room with her, and she’s still fearful of what he might do to her.”
The next morning, Giddens’ brother Alvin Brooks came to take her boys to school. He honked his horn, but no one came out. He called Giddens, but got no answer. He called their mother and Daniel: Neither had heard from Giddens.
Daniel came over, but neither he nor Brooks had keys to the apartment’s metal front door. Daniel yelled inside, and one of his sons responded, and managed to open the back door. Giddens’ two youngest sons, ages 6 and 2, were there alone. The oldest was with another relative.
Her family believes Jackson knows what became of her.
“I cannot say with evidence, by his hands, that she’s missing, but I know in my heart that she’s missing because of him,” Pendleton said. “If he knows anything, we ask for him to just tell us. I think we could deal with things better if we know the truth — if we have Ebony.... That’s the main thing: We want Ebony.”
Anyone with information on her disappearance may call police at 706-653-3400.
This story was originally published October 31, 2019 at 9:58 AM.