Local crime victims share their pain with Georgia parole board
Time does not heal all wounds, not even 30 years.
Among those gathered Wednesday at the Columbus Government Center to meet with Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles was a 43-year-old woman who for years had not talked to anyone about her case.
Two weeks ago, she got notice the man who raped and sodomized her was up for parole, so she came to Wednesday’s “Victims Visitors’ Day” to check on his status.
He was coming up for parole, she was told, but now that the board knew she still was hurting from what happened when she was just 11 years old, the perpetrator likely would serve more time — more than the 30 years he’s already been jailed.
When she was raped Nov. 4, 1985, she did not know the man attacking her: He was a stranger. But she learned more about Embery J. McBride when he was arrested.
“That’s when I found out he had a victim before me,” she said. The other woman, an adult McBride assaulted in 1982, came forward to testify.
He went to prison on charges of rape and aggravated sodomy, and there he remains — so far. Georgia Department of Corrections records show McBride’s serving a life sentence in the Wheeler Correctional Facility in Alamo.
In the years since her assault, the woman got on with her life, but she can’t forget. The memory still spawns nightmares: “I live with this daily still,” she said.
Shelly Hall, who heads the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit’s Victim-Witness Assistance Program, admired the woman’s willingness to attend Wednesday’s event: “It was really courageous for her to come here today,” Hall said.
The woman was among 160 people, all victims or victims’ families, who met with parole board members. The board had not visited Columbus for a victims visitors’ day since 2009. The five-member board the governor appoints has gained four new representatives since.
Since 2006, the board has met 2,200 victims or their families at 20 sites around the state, said Terry Barnard, who chairs the board.
The meetings have a significant influence on how board members view cases, he said: “This will carry a tremendous amount of weight.”
The meetings provide insight not only to the board, but to the families who question how the system works. Citing quotes he’d heard from participants, Barnard recited one as, “There were questions I had for years that were answered today.”
A recurring observation from victims and families Wednesday was that the passage of years does not numb their pain.
“I haven’t been the same,” Vickey Daniel said of losing her son Kenneth Williams nearly 10 years ago.
Williams was riding with five others in a pickup truck police said cut another vehicle off in traffic Dec. 10, 2005. A man named Jeremy Sanders was driving the other automobile, and followed the truck before shooting at it on Columbus’ Sidney Simons Boulevard.
Williams was putting a compact disc into the truck’s player when a bullet hit him in the head, Daniel said. An older brother was among those in the truck with him.
She still remembers the brother calling her after the midnight shooting: “Mama, Mama! Kenneth’s been shot!” he told her.
Her son, who had turned 23 on Dec. 1, died at the hospital. He left behind a 5-year-old daughter, who’s 15 today, Daniel said.
Though Sanders claimed a passenger with him fired the fatal shot, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison, followed by seven years’ probation.
Daniel did not agree with the plea agreement. She can’t do anything about that now, but she can make sure Sanders serves every day of his sentence, she said: “I’m here as Kenneth’s voice.”
Her experience has a peculiar twist, because in a way she still can see her late son’s face: He was a twin. But seeing his twin brother now reminds her of Williams, and how he died, and it makes her angry, she said.
Addressing participants during an opening program Wednesday was Dana Reynolds, whose then-boyfriend Jose Lopez fatally injured her 4-month-old daughter while beating the child May 11, 1987. He even held the infant by her ankles and swung her against a bed post, Reynolds said.
Brain dead, the girl died in the hospital.
This May will mark 28 years since Lopez first was jailed, she said. She lobbies against his release every time he comes up for parole, and encourages other families to make sure the parole board hears from them. If it doesn’t, it hears only from the perpetrators’ supporters, she said.
Reynolds was among the first here to participate in a “dialogue” between victims or their families and offenders. On Oct. 17, she met with Lopez and a facilitator. She had questions for him.
One of her questions was how long her daughter suffered.
“Until they pulled the plug,” she said Lopez answered.
Reynolds was just 18 when her daughter died, but remains committed to keeping Brittany Leigh Wardwell’s memory alive.
“I don’t want anyone to forget my daughter,” she said Wednesday, showing a framed photo of the little girl. “My fight will never be over.”
Wednesday’s event began at 10 a.m., and individual parole board members were to meet with victims or victims’ families until 6:30 p.m. Barnard said the board would make no parole decisions that day, and that was unusual, because it’s a daily task: The board holds 78,000 to 80,000 votes a year, working almost every day. Three votes out of five are enough to decide a case, he said.
Until 2010, board members worked only with hard-copy records, but with online access and digital data, they now can do their work anywhere, Barnard said: They don’t have to hold a face-to-face meeting.
“The only time we come together as a board to work as a panel is in clemency hearings for death-penalty cases,” he said. “We do come together as a panel there, and we actually do take in testimony and work from there.”
Hall said her office continues to amass a database of victims and families who want to be updated on their cases and notified of any upcoming hearings. The office number is 706-653-4426.
This story was originally published January 7, 2015 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Local crime victims share their pain with Georgia parole board."