Victim’s family speaks out after suspect charged with fatally stabbing Columbus father of 6
Antonio Blanding’s mother doesn’t want the woman accused of fatally stabbing him to walk free again.
“I want her to stay in jail for the rest of her life,” Betty Blanding said Monday outside Columbus Recorder’s Court, where murder suspect Vivian Denise Fletcher’s preliminary hearing was postponed to 9 a.m. May 24.
“She stabbed my son,” Blanding said. “She don’t need to be out. She’s a danger to society.”
Besides murder, Fletcher, 35, is charged with using a knife to commit a crime.
Around 2:30 a.m. Aug. 8, 2020, police were called to reports of someone on the ground at 32nd Avenue and Cusseta Road, and found the 31-year-old man with stab wounds, authorities said.
Paramedics were unable to revive Blanding, whom Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan pronounced dead there at 3:01 a.m.
Detectives got a warrant for Fletcher’s arrest in September, but she left the state. She was captured in March in Williston, Florida, and booked Friday evening into the Muscogee County Jail.
Her Recorder’s Court hearing was postponed to give her time to hire a private attorney. She asked Judge Julius Hunter for three weeks.
District Attorney Mark Jones, serving as the prosecutor in Recorder’s Court, objected.
“We have both our detectives here. They’re very busy,” Jones said. “We have the victims’ family here. They’ve got lives. She could have hired an attorney before court today. She absconded. She was down in Florida. She could have made arrangements to have a defense counsel with her today.”
“Let me say this, Mr. Jones: She’s the one sitting in jail all this time,” Hunter replied. “So if she wants a three-week continuance, I’m going to give it to her.”
The victim’s mother said she’ll be back, for the next hearing.
“I sure will,” she said. “I’ll be here every time.”
Father of six
Betty Blanding said Fletcher and her son had been romantically involved, and had trouble before.
“They were together, but that still doesn’t give her the right to kill him,” she said. “She had stabbed him once before, and he stayed in the hospital, and she did some time for that.”
She had to restrain herself in court Monday, she said: “I really wanted to go over there and do something to her. She couldn’t look at me. I didn’t want to look at her. It just tore my insides up.”
Asked what her son was like, she said: “He was nice, quiet, stayed to himself. She killed him, and she left. He left six children behind, and they miss their daddy.”
Gabrielle Blanding, Antonio Blanding’s wife who shared six children with him, also was at Monday’s court session.
“She killed my kids’ father, and my son has been taking it real hard,” she said. The children’s ages range from 9 to 15, she said.
“It still doesn’t seem real to me,” she added.