She was the matriarch of East Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Mama Edna knew everyone in that neighborhood,
and everyone knew her.
She loved making people laugh.
- Forever 21! - Forever 21!
Everyone loved her.
But somebody wanted her dead.
♪
What would take over someone to do something like this?
Homicide investigators begin with those closest to her.
Within hours of his wife's murder,
everybody knew that he was in an estranged marriage.
Her husband was in the house
at the time that this happened.
But other possibilities begin to surface.
Edna's basement was a full-fledged gambling location.
This could have been somebody coming to collect a debt.
We said the name Edna, her body just started to rock.
She knew what had happened.
But how this would end, no one saw coming.
It was something I've never seen before.
This...is Voodoo.
Witchcraft.
♪
Far from the concrete canyons of Wall Street
and the bright lights of Broadway,
deep in the heart of blue-collar Brooklyn,
sits the tree-lined streets of East Flatbush.
In this vibrant West-Indian community,
Mama Edna is known to all
as a pillar of the neighborhood,
a maternal figure to many,
a pioneer from Haiti,
to the once Italian-Jewish area of the 1960s.
Mama Edna brought with her a love of Haitian culture,
which included the widely misunderstood
religion of Voodoo.
Unfortunately, it's right within her very house
where Voodoo powers came into question
in her shocking death.
♪
It was a cold February night here
when 16-year-old, Brianna Jean Baptiste
and her mother Marjorie
were driving down Troy Avenue on their way home.
It was around,
I would say, 7:00.
My mom was telling me that we're gonna go stop
at my grandmother's house to go pick something up.
Brianna's grandmother
is 78-year-old Edna Pierre-Jacques.
Marjorie and Brianna had gone to Edna's house
because Edna had been bugging her about
picking up a gift she gotten her.
The drive there, my mom was like,
"Can you just go upstairs to go grab the gift for me?"
I opened the door
to my grandmother's house.
I realized that her lamp
was on in the living room,
and she wasn't sitting there.
It was strange.
If she's not in the living room,
it's not a high chance
of the light still being on.
So I head upstairs.
I looked inside her room,
and that's when I looked to the ground,
and that's when I seen her body.
I don't know why in my head
I'm thinking she's sleeping or something,
but that's when I seen blood.
I ran to my mom's car, and I banged on the window.
I'm like, "Mommy, Mommy, something's wrong with Mana!"
And she immediately ran up the steps and said to call 911.
So once I start calling 911,
my mom runs to my grandfather's room.
Although Edna's husband lives in the house,
he sleeps in a separate bedroom.
My grandfather was in the room next to us.
My mom is banging on the door,
and she's like, "Something happened."
And that's when he runs out.
It didn't take a long time
for the firefighters to come.
They kind of just looked at her
and looked at my mom
and was like,
you know, "There's not much we can do."
And that's when I'm like,
just taken back, like...
So I just immediately, like, walked away.
I needed to, like,
process what just was said.
Additional first responders
converged on the Troy Avenue home.
They survey the scene
and begin to suspect Edna didn't die by accident.
But for now, they keep that suspicion
from the family and call for the detective squad.
The information that I was given from Troy Avenue
was that they had a elderly Black female
found unconscious,
and there were items found in the room
which was consistent
to her being assaulted.
We didn't know what happened,
but we all believed that,
okay, it was a accident.
She probably just hit her head
or fell or I don't know.
I stepped outside
to call my sisters, my dad,
everyone else to kind of fill them in on what was happening.
Hearing the commotion outside,
neighbors begin gathering on Troy Avenue.
I'm like, "What's happening? What's happening?"
And Margie was like, "My mom is dead."
It knocked the complete wind out of me.
I grew up across the street,
and Edna was like a second mom to me.
♪
All of the kids that I grew up with
used to hang at Miss Edna's house.
We ate at Mama Edna's house.
We played in her house.
That night,
all of us were in front of the house waiting.
My girlfriend, Amanda,
she was like, "Well, I'm down the block.
I'm gonna meet you there."
And Tamisha was there.
Mama Edna and Tamisha was very close.
I can see that Tamisha's
just in shock and heartbroken.
We all were.
20 minutes later,
Brianna's sisters arrive.
When I got to my grandmother's house,
I tried to run in the house, and I was stopped.
The police immediately told them,
"You cannot come in."
And that's when they told her you cannot come in
'cause it's a homicide.
I kind of got angry.
I was like, "What are they talking about?
Like, no. No it's not, like, how?"
When we get to the scene,
we do what we call a walk through.
♪
We don't find any forced entry through the doors,
any forced entry through windows.
As we walked into the second floor,
the first thing I spotted
was Edna laying on the floor in the pool of blood.
She seemed to have some injuries to her head.
I looked over to where Edna was laying,
and I noticed a hammer, which had blood on it.
The hands of Miss Edna
also had a lot of broken fingernails
that would indicate to us that she was in a struggle.
We also noticed ligature marks around her neck,
as if she was strangled.
And further looking on the floor,
we noticed that there was a lot of cables
that were laying near her.
Seeing Edna, an elderly woman,
lying on the floor,
beaten to death, strangled,
it touches you.
That could be my mom,
or that could be a family member.
You just...
get in a mode
that you want to do
everything possible
to find this person's killer.
The first question the detectives asked me was,
"Do you know anybody
who your grandmother had problems with?"
And I was like,
"We are speaking of my grandmother, right?"
My grandmother was well known
in the community and loved.
The Pierre-Jacques originated from Haiti,
but they were the second
African-American family that moved on Troy Avenue.
They came in, like, 1968.
My grandfather owned his own mechanic shop.
Edna was a seamstress when I was younger.
My grandparents had four kids,
and my grandmother, she was the glue.
She kept the family together.
Okay. Now let me serve people.
Everyone used to hang out at Miss Edna's house.
She used to do our hair.
All the kids in the community embraced her.
- Forever 21! - Forever 21!
Mama Edna loved telling jokes.
She loved making people laugh.
You made your wish?
Oh, my God! No, shut up!
She loved to dance. She loved music.
Dancing was a part of her everyday routine.
And she loved to cook for people.
Her food was the best
Haitian food I have ever tasted.
Her food was the best,
her food and her smile.
The family didn't know why
or who would want to hurt
their mom and grandmother in such a way.
♪
Without a clear suspect from the get-go,
detectives begin looking into Edna's living situation.
We come to the immediate conclusion
that the husband is living under the same roof,
and they're living in different rooms.
Our detectives were stunned to find out
Frederick was inside his room just steps away from his wife
at the likely time of her murder.
Looking into a spouse is already standard procedure
in a homicide investigation,
but now Frederick has some serious explaining to do.
So we're talking with him.
He's very emotional,
knowing that his wife is gone,
but we knew that their relationship
wasn't the best.
I mean, they lived in separate rooms.
We already knew that he was there
and his answer to us
was that he didn't hear or see anything.
So we found that sort of odd.
Detectives Figueroa and Alonso
search Frederick's room for any sign of foul play.
Instead, they find something strange.
There was a book open to a specific page.
The page it was open on,
it had the title of "How to Get Rid of a Witch."
And it shows that you write the name of the person,
and you burn the pieces of paper,
and there was a candle.
And it seemed to have burnt papers on it,
and right next to it,
we found strips of paper with Edna's name on it.
Me and my partner, we looked at each other,
he was like, "This is Voodoo, witchcraft."
Coming up...
Once we saw the basement,
we knew that it could have been a reason
why Edna was killed.
But all of a sudden,
the case takes a different route.
The spirits had taken over her.
It was some sort of Voodoo spell.
Beloved grandmother, Edna Pierre-Jacques,
was found strangled to death in her East Flatbush home.
Now my squad wonders
if her husband, Frederick,
and his apparent belief in Voodoo
played a role in the murder.
Being that I worked in East Flatbush,
there's a lot of people that practice Voodoo.
I've been to many basements
where I've seen chickens being slaughtered.
And it wasn't because they were looking to cook the chicken.
Voodoo, some people they might think
it's like witchcraft and, like, oh, my God,
spells and stuff, but no, Voodoo is religion.
That was my grandmother's religion.
It wasn't anything crazy.
Voodoo is a polytheistic religion,
so it's a lot of channeling people and ancestors
that may inspire you.
But this was something, you know,
that I've never seen before.
We have Frederick
with these papers
that he's burning and with this spell.
Based on the evidence before them,
detectives consider a troubling conclusion.
It was like Frederick was upset
because his wife
was some sort of like a witch doctor.
And because there was no forced entry into the home,
we believe that whoever did this to Enda
would have known her,
and the fact that Frederick
was stating that he was in the house
at the time that this happened,
it kind of raises a lot of red flags for us.
Particularly in Brooklyn,
over the years, my detective squads
have uncovered numerous assaults and even homicides
where the perp claimed to have been influenced by Voodoo.
Like any belief system,
sometimes followers of Voodoo take things to extremes.
We have to take this development seriously.
So our detectives asked Frederick
if they can interview him at length at the 67 Precinct.
He came willingly in the car.
He was transported back,
so that when we get back we can speak to him
after going through the location.
The whole Pierre-Jacques family
is outside on Troy Avenue.
I mean, we're about 20 deep.
When they all see the patriarch Frederick
leaving in the squad car to go to the precinct,
a wave of worry crosses the crowd.
Marjorie, she's like,
"They have Papa Frederick locked up
because they think that he killed my mom."
And I was like, "That's impossible."
The police officers,
they were definitely talking to neighbors.
They definitely said that my grandparents
weren't together really,
and they did live in separate rooms
and they really didn't speak much.
And neighbors had an inclination
that Edna practiced Voodoo.
I remember one time growing up
I went to ask Edna,
I said, "Mama Edna,
"the kids in the area
said that you practiced Voodoo."
She's like, "My Jackie, I'm gonna tell you one thing...
"Voodoo only takes you
if you believe in it."
So because of the conversations
that we had,
I believe that Edna was some sort of spiritual healer.
I believe that Frederick was upset
that his wife was a spiritual healer
or Voodoo witchdoctor,
and he wanted to remove her
from doing these spells on people.
Before heading back to the precinct
to interview Frederick,
Detectives Figueroa and Alonzo
make one last turn of the house.
So at this time,
we did another look into the apartment.
We kind of walked downstairs
and made sure there was no other forced entry
to the apartment.
And when we went into the basement,
to our surprise,
we located what we thought
seemed to be like an illegal gambling spot.
It wasn't something elaborate
like you would find in Atlantic City,
but you could tell that there was tables.
There was a couple of slot machines.
There was chalkboards.
We saw a section of the room
that was sectioned off for,
like, almost, like, an office
that had fax machines,
cell phones, cash registers, calculators.
It was a full-fledged gambling location.
My team was still eager
to question Edna's husband, Frederick,
but this was a huge development.
New York City is home
to countless underground gambling operations.
More often than not,
these establishments are settings for armed robberies,
assaults, and homicides.
So finding one of them beneath Edna's crime scene
presented us with a whole new set of motives to consider.
Once we saw the basement,
we knew that it could have been a reason
why Edna was killed.
Obviously, with these gambling locations,
there's a lot of money being handed back and forth.
This could have been a robbery that went bad,
or could it be somebody coming to collect a debt?
We didn't know
who was the owner
of that operation,
but we knew we had to speak to Frederick
as urgently as possible.
♪
NYPD detectives
investigating the murder of Edna Pierre-Jacques
had just stumbled onto a gambling den
in the basement of her home.
While I had the basement processed for evidence,
Detectives Figueroa and Alonso
returned to the 67 Precinct
to question Edna's husband Frederick.
Frederick had no problem speaking to us
at our detective unit.
We decided not to question Frederick
about the Voodoo material found in his room.
In the first hours of a homicide investigation,
our priority is to keep a suspect
cooperative and talking.
At this stage, we didn't want Frederick to know
we viewed him as a suspect,
which could have caused him to lawyer up.
But we did go hard asking about the gambling spot
in the basement.
Frederick tells us that he rents
the basement out to a person,
and it's their operation.
The money that they get as rent
is what they use to supplement paying the bills.
He tells us it was more of his wife
that knew who this person was.
He was pretty much just a silent partner.
Frederick is still adamant
that he had nothing to do with Edna's death
and that he didn't see or hear a thing
when she most likely was murdered.
My grandfather's TV was always on 24/7.
He's always watching TV.
His TV is always loud.
The walls are pretty thick in that house as well,
so if one thing is going on in one room,
it's a high chance you're not going to hear it.
By daybreak, detectives continue working on Frederick.
Meanwhile, news of the murder ripples across the city.
East Flatbush neighbors are still in shock about...
Pierre-Jacques was violently attacked inside her own home.
I walked around, make sure all the doors were locked,
make sure the windows were locked.
Everyone was scared because you don't know
what's happening on this block.
After they brought him to the precinct,
they kept my grandfather
for probably about that night
and then the next full day.
But a full 24 hours into the investigation,
everything Frederick has told detectives is corroborated.
Investigators find no defensive wounds on his body,
and forensic testing reveals he never held
the hammer or the wires that killed Edna.
Frederick was incredibly cooperative.
He did nothing but speak to us and help us.
And while the burnt papers and book of spells
in Frederick's room
might have initially suggested his involvement,
the physical evidence says otherwise.
In the end, detectives never find a need
to question Frederick at all about the items in his room.
After speaking with him, we were satisfied
that Mr. Frederick was not a person of interest.
My grandfather is what you call
the epitome of a Caribbean man,
very strong, don't show much emotion,
but that was the first time I've seen him cry.
He let us know,
"Our marriage wasn't always like this."
They used to be very happy.
They had a lovely home,
and Edna was the life of that house.
She brought life to that house.
You smell that coffee every morning.
We smell her bread
that she makes every morning.
We hear the radio playing.
He still cared for her, and we knew he still loved her.
And my grandfather felt helpless
from not being able to stop what happened.
He felt like, "If I would have known..."
He would have stopped it, so...
I think he just felt bad.
He wanted this solved.
As estranged as he was from Edna,
someone walked into his home
and killed the mother of his children.
Someone needed to pay for this.
With Frederick ruled out,
our detectives redirect their focus
on their only other potential lead,
the gambling den found in Frederick and Edna's basement.
After we knew it was a homicide,
immediately I did think it was somebody from the basement.
♪
But we don't see that there's anything
indicating that that door was broken,
that there was any forced entry down there.
There was no money laying on the floor
or any boxes that were tampered with.
We found nothing leading back upstairs
to what happened to Edna.
And we did locate a female
who was somewhat considered herself as the manager
of the spot downstairs.
She said that she was not in the basement
on the day of Edna's death.
The operation was not active on that Monday.
Unable to find evidence of foul play in the basement,
our detectives were satisfied that the gambling den
played no role in Edna's murder.
We were back at square one.
Nothing made sense, to be honest.
Like, I didn't know what was happening.
You know, I do remember the NYPD,
one of the cops saying
that when anything like this happens,
you'll be surprised.
It's always someone that's close to the family.
Then you start thinking,
"Who's close to the family that would do this to her?
That's ridiculous."
So now we're leaning on the family
to try to see who could have seen Edna last.
Who spoke to Edna last?
We end up finding someone in the family,
which is a granddaughter,
Shakira is her name,
had came earlier during the day.
My sister Shakira
went to go visit my grandmother
just a couple of hours before my grandmother was murdered.
Shakira remembers going to the house
because she was coming to pick up some clothing
at around 6:00 p.m.
She recalls going in,
and she saw her grandmother Edna
sitting on the couch.
And she saw another younger woman
that was also with Edna in the living room area.
Shakira tells detectives
that she got what she came for and left,
but not before saying a quick hello
to the other woman who she knows as Tamisha.
Now, who's Tamisha?
Coming up...
What would spook someone
to just disappear out of nowhere?
Very suddenly, she says,
♪
My South Brooklyn squad had just found out
that the last person seen with Edna Pierre-Jacques
prior to her murder
was a 43-year-old woman named Tamisha Harper.
Tamisha was at my grandmother's house
almost every day.
She was there all the time.
The night that everything happened,
Tamisha was there.
It seemed like she wanted to just hang out.
Shakira told me she was just sitting on the couch
just watching TV chilling.
Detectives learned that Tamisha
lived across the street from Edna
and was considered by many
to be Edna's best friend.
Even though we was with our grandmother every day,
she was with my grandmother every single day.
Tamisha was always in the house.
Whenever she would come out from work,
she would come and visit Edna to help her out,
whether it would be cleaning or cooking.
Edna was more like
a mother figure to Tamisha,
and Tamisha loved her to death.
We received information that
on the night of Edna's death,
some of the family members
had seen Tamisha across the street.
After the firefighters came
and said that my grandmother passed away,
my mom's initial reaction was to go across the street
to tell Tamisha.
So my mom ran to her,
cried in her arms,
and was like, "My mom died. She's gone."
I could see Tamisha just hyperventilating.
She's having a panic attack.
She's kind of like falling over.
Now that we've learned the identity of Tamisha
and that she was the last person now seen with Edna,
we want to speak to her.
We want to know, what did she see?
Was there someone else that she left her with when she left?
But our detectives were about to find out
that interviewing Tamisha might prove difficult.
According to family,
soon after learning that Edna
appeared to have died in an accident,
a distraught Tamisha withdrew from the gathering crowd.
The whole family kind of was outside,
and the police went upstairs
to look at the body.
And then they came back downstairs
and said, "This is a homicide."
But Tamisha wasn't around to hear the news.
My aunt calls her,
my sister was calling her,
and no one was getting through to her.
We're thinking that Tamisha is grieving,
but she knows something that we don't
because she was the last one with her.
So one of her youngest brothers was outside,
and we said, "Philip, where's your sister?
"Is she home? You know, call her.
Let her know what's happening out here."
He didn't know where his sister was either.
He was calling her too, and she wasn't answering.
And then he said,
"That's Tamisha right there."
We're standing in the middle of the street,
and one of the cars came out
from across the street, out of the driveway.
And you can see Tamisha and her boyfriend.
Her boyfriend was driving. She was in the passenger seat.
So I looked at Marjorie, and we ran to the car.
The windows were rolled up. We were knocking on the car.
So Marjorie was saying to her,
"You know, Tamisha, somebody killed my mom.
Did you see anything?"
Tamisha did not roll down a window.
She did not get out the car.
She did not acknowledge us at all.
She just kept going, like she didn't even stop.
And Margorie is like,
"She's probably in shock like we all are."
Initially, no one gave to Tamisha's strange behavior
from that night a second thought,
but according to family, Tamisha never returned home,
and no one has been able to get a hold of her
or her boyfriend ever since.
Now two days into the investigation,
Edna's family is starting to wonder
if Tamisha knows something about the murder.
Well, it was kind of odd
when we learned that Tamisha wasn't home,
and she wasn't answering anyone's phone calls.
You don't really pack up and leave
and disappear out of nowhere.
It's not a common thing to do
when you're considered part of the family,
and Edna was just brutally murdered
and you're nowhere to be found now.
What would spook someone
to just disappear out of nowhere
and not answer phone calls now?
What is she afraid of?
What did she see?
A panic sets in
because Tamisha was with Edna
before the murder,
so there's a possibility
that Tamisha may be in danger as well.
We thought that Tamisha had fled
because maybe she saw something
she wasn't supposed to see.
Now she's scared for her life.
She's scared for her safety.
Hoping to get a bead on Tamisha,
detectives attempt to locate her boyfriend,
but his whereabouts are equally unknown.
That now brings up
another question in our investigation.
Is Tamisha afraid of him?
I didn't know much about Tamisha's boyfriend.
I didn't even know what he looked like at all.
I probably seen him once or twice,
but I never spoke with him.
We're trying to connect all the dots.
Did the boyfriend have something to do
with Edna's death?
Was Tamisha taken against her will?
♪
Two days had passed since Edna Pierre-Jacques
was found strangled to death in her East Flatbush home.
It was then that my detectives found out
the last person sitting with Edna,
her best friend and neighbor, Tamisha Harper,
had gone missing.
And according to Edna's family,
Tamisha's boyfriend was also nowhere to be found.
We didn't know what to think,
but we needed to speak to Tamisha.
We're trying to locate her
through her phone, but her phone is off.
We spoke to where she worked.
She was highly regarded,
an exemplary employee.
She was never late, always on time.
But detectives learned
that Tamisha hasn't shown up to work
since the day of Edna's murder.
We conduct computer checks,
and we've knocked at every door in Brooklyn,
every address that she's used in the past--
everything led to negative results.
We then found a address in New Jersey.
It was probably the last location
that we had on file for her.
Three days after Edna's murder on March 2, 2017,
detectives drive across the Verrazano Bridge
through Staten Island and into New Jersey.
It was a quiet block.
We walk up to the address, ring the bell,
and a lady opens the door.
We identify ourselves as New York City Police Detectives
looking for Tamisha Harper.
The lady tells us that Tamisha was her daughter
and that she was in the house.
So Tamisha's mother points us to her living room.
And as we're walking into the house,
getting close to the living room,
we noticed that the area was dim.
It was sort of dark.
So as we get closer,
I see Tamisha
almost like in a... fetal position.
It looked like she hasn't slept for days.
She had this blank stare
in her eyes.
Her hair...her hair was all over the place,
almost like it hasn't been combed in days.
Tamisha had a look on her face.
It wasn't a person who looked
that they were scared.
It just--it was kind of hard to describe,
like, a million-mile stare right through us.
So we introduce ourselves to Tamisha.
We say that we're there
because we're investigating the murder of Edna.
And it was almost after we said the name Edna, you know,
her body just started to rock.
She was, again, in this fetal position,
just rocking back and forth.
Her motion and her demeanor
and her appearance
told me that she knew something.
She knew what had happened to Edna.
We asked her
if she could walk us through what happened that day.
Tamisha dives into a story
that begins weeks before Edna's murder.
She claims a woman from the neighborhood
became worried that her boyfriend
might be interested in Tamisha,
and the woman was a devout practitioner of Voodoo.
Tamisha says she found out that this woman
put some sort of, like, curse on Tamisha...
And once she found that out,
she sought the help of Edna,
who was a spiritual healer
and good in removing
bad demons from people.
She knew that Edna was practicing Voodoo.
She said that Edna agreed to help her.
On the day of Edna's death,
she had came over for her services.
She states that everything was fine
and that her and Edna had a conversation,
which led us to believe that that's when Shakira came by.
Tamisha claims she went home
soon after Shakira left.
Tamisha also said
that she was feeling under the weather a little bit
and that she went back home
and agreed to come back later on
because Enda was gonna help her.
Edna would do certain stuff, and she called it work.
It was the word that she used, the terminology.
She doesn't know the exact time,
but a few hours later she comes back to Edna's house.
But this time she says that she was coughing a lot.
She described it as a nasty cough.
And then Edna says, "You've been touched.
The spirits are in you."
So at which point my partner and I,
we look at each other.
We asked her, "What does that mean?"
She said that, "Someone did some work against me,
and I was touched."
Someone had casted something over her at this time.
Tamisha now says that Edna looked at her
straight at her face and says, "You're here to hurt me."
And Tamisha laughs it off,
and she says, "No, you're like a mom to me.
What are you talking about?"
And then Tamisha goes into a far stare, like,
you know, she's going back
and like, reliving this it looks like almost.
With another calm voice, she says,
"And she went upstairs, and I followed."
♪
24 miles from Brooklyn
inside a living room in Linden, New Jersey,
my detectives are all but certain
that Tamisha Harper is about to explain
how and why Edna Pierre-Jacques was murdered.
Tamisha says she walks right in behind Edna
when she's going into her bedroom.
She's in her room,
and it looks like Edna's back is towards Tamisha,
because she turns around
and very suddenly she says,
"You're here to kill me."
Tamisha says that, for some reason,
once Edna says, "You're here to kill me,"
she says that she got this enormous amount of power
within her body that she could not believe,
that she's never felt before.
Tamisha said that the spirits
had taken over her
as the result of some sort of Voodoo spell.
Tamisha is, like, zoning out,
and the next thing she tells us
is that she goes at Edna's neck
and starts choking her out.
And that's when she says she hears Edna
screaming for Frederick
who's in the next room, and it scares her
because now she doesn't want Frederick walking in on them.
She said that she started applying this pressure,
they fall to the ground.
She says, "There was a hammer there."
She describes grabbing the hammer,
but never describes hitting Edna with it.
And she says, "I was choking her with some cables.
I was trying to keep her quiet."
Edna was fighting.
She was struggling.
And she's just choking her out
to the point where she stops screaming.
Tamisha says, "There was blood on the floor.
"I got up. I went home.
I just walked across the street and went home and showered."
She says she calls her boyfriend
and tells him that I just killed Edna.
He tells her,
"You have to go to your mother's house.
I'm going to come pick you up right now."
Detectives place Tamisha under arrest
for Edna Pierre-Jacques' murder.
Unable to corroborate anything Tamisha alleged
about her boyfriend's offer to help her escape,
the Kings County DA
chooses not to file any charges against the boyfriend.
The following day
after we had processed Tamisha Harper,
we called Edna's family members,
and we told them that we had some news.
I said, "Oh, my God, but why?
I don't understand."
Never in a million years
would I have thought
that this story would have ended
with Tamisha killing Mama Edna, never.
I was completely in shock.
I couldn't understand at all
how, what, when, why,
it could have been her, like,
what even
made that happen?
It was so confusing.
She said she was possessed.
Then later on she was like,
"My grandmother did a spell on her"
or something like that.
And I was just like, "Okay."
Honestly, that doesn't even make sense to me.
It's still really hard for me to understand
what happened between them,
why she snapped
and actually killed her in such a violent way.
What could she have done to you
that was so wrong that you had to take her life?
Why?
The Kings County DA
allows Tamisha to plead to manslaughter one,
reducing the charge for murder two,
because it would spare Edna's family from a painful trial.
There was never any trial for Tamisha.
Tamisha accepted her responsibility
for what she had did to Edna,
and she pled guilty to the charges.
Tamisha Harper is sentenced to 17 years in prison.
I'm still in shock.
I still can't believe.
Every time I walk past her house, I can't believe.
I miss my grandmother dearly.
I would do anything to have her back.
I always expected my grandmother to be
a part of my wedding.
Whenever I have kids, to be there,
without her it breaks my heart.
It's not fair.
I think about her every day...
her laugh, her jokes,
I miss her food a lot.
But I miss her conversation.
I miss her advice a lot.
I miss her smile.
I miss our talks,
our sitting on the steps just talking.
Every time I close my eyes, I could still hear her,
hear her voice speaking to me,
see her smile on her face.
She loved life.
She loved living her life.
And that's what hurts most,
because someone took it away from her.