Merah was 8 years old. Elias, 7. Nahtahn, 6. Gabriel was barely 2, and Abigail, the youngest, just 1.
The five were children of Timothy Ray Jones Jr., a computer engineer from Lexington, South Carolina, who took their lives in the family home in August 2014 and then drove more than 700 miles with their bodies for nine days, until police arrested him at a checkpoint in Mississippi.
At the trial, as the jury deliberated his sentence, something no one expected happened: Amber Kyzer, the mother of the five children, took the stand and asked that he not be sentenced to death. Not even the deepest pain a mother can feel could extinguish her compassion. The jury took less than two hours to decide otherwise, and in 2023 the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld that sentence.
