For 14 months, as rumors swirled around the burning death ofJessica Chambers, the mystery of who killed the 19-year-old Mississippi native went unsolved.
In court on Tuesday, during the first day of testimony in the retrial of her accused killer, jurors heard that Chambers was still alive when first responders reached her on the night of Dec. 6, 2014.
The former small-town high school cheerleader and her vehicle, a Kia Rio, had been splashed with fuel and set on fire on a rural roadside in Courtland. Burns covered 98 percent of her body. A passing motorist had called 911, drawing volunteer firefighters to the still-smoldering scene.
Airlifted to a Memphis hospital 60 miles away, Jessica died hours later.
He later wascharged in her murder, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
AP Photo/The Commercial Appeal, Stan Carroll
Chambers’ family has long been waiting for answers, but her mother, Lisa Daugherty, tells PEOPLE that she’s “never lost hope.”
“I use my faith in God,” she says. “He gives me hope that there will be justice for Jessica. We will find out who did it.”
The most persistent whisper after Chambers’ death alleged that it was gang-related. While earning As and Bs in high school, Chambers built friendships across all spectrums in the tiny town, population 500.
More than a few observers interpreted some of those relationships to be trouble. A former boyfriend, Travis Sanford, was in prison on a burglary charge at the time of her murder.
Chambers’ father, has said that she shared concerns with him that some in her circle suspected she was “snitching” on them because her dad was a mechanic for the sheriff’s office.
“Nobody ever claimed she was a saint,” says Chambers’ mother. “She never treated anybody different. It didn’t matter what you’d done, because she wasn’t a judgmental person. Everybody deserved a fair chance even after they’d done their time, and she believed that.”
AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
In the early stages, investigators with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the Panola County Sheriff’s Office questioned several possible witnesses, reviewed Chambers’ cell phone data for clues and scoured a piece of video footage that showed her outside an M&M mini-mart 90 minutes before first responders discovered her on fire about one mile from the gas station.
The grainy footage showed Chambers waving before she walked over to speak with someone. The surveillance camera also picked up a man in a striped shirt filling up a gas can before walking in the same direction as the teen. Soon afterwards, Chambers was seen returning to her car and driving off.
As fear and suspicion grew, the investigation eventually led authorities a year later to arrest 17 suspected area gang members on gun and drug charges.
However, District Attorney John Champion told PEOPLE in 2015, “I don’t anticipate any of these [arrests] being directly tied to the Chambers case. But in their plea negotiations, all will be given the opportunity to help themselves — and maybe that will bring us closer to the truth.”
Whatever that truth was, Champion had no doubt the attack was “very, very personal. Someone meant to cause her great pain.”
In February 2016, the district attorneyannounced the indictmentof Tellis, whom he identified as a gang member and “habitual offender.”
Champion said authorities focused on Tellis after verifying information on the location of his phone.
Chambers Family
The timeline authorities constructed showed that Chambers had been home just before 5 p.m. on the day of her attack, napping in a chair in her living room after watchingCSIwith her mother. After answering a call on her cell phone, she left in her car and reached the M&M mini-mart at 5:15 p.m., where she bought $14 in gas.
Cell phone records then placed her for 10-15 minutes in the area of a stoplight on Highway 6, headed toward Batesville. The subsequent 62 minutes — between 6:30 p.m. and 7:32 p.m., also known as the “mystery hour” — took time to untangle. when Jessica’s phone showed she reached the Herron Road location where her burning vehicle was spotted.
The prosecution eventually alleged that phone records placed Chambers and Tellis together before she died and said Tellis admitted to policethat they were together that day. They also alleged they had evidence of his DNA on Chambers’ car keys.
During Tellis’ first murder trial, Champion argued that he and Chambers eventually had sex the night she was attacked, after which Tellis tried to suffocate her before setting her and her vehicle on fire, believing she was already dead.
At Tellis’ first trial, Palmer said he was at the store at the time of Chambers’ attack, though prosecutors contended that is where he went after setting Chambers on fire in order to give himself a false alibi,according to theClarion-Ledger.
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In court on Tuesday, one of the first witnesses for the prosecution was Carolyn Higdon, a speech pathology expert, who said that injuries to Chambers’ mouth and larynx, as shown in an autopsy, would have restricted her ability to articulate words, WREG reports.
Asked specifically if Chambers would have been able to enunciate “Eric” or “Derek,” Higdon said no.
Chambers’ mother believes her daughter may have been trying to tell first responders something else, after possibly awaking from unconsciousness to find herself on fire and not knowing what happened.
“What if she thought she had a ‘wreck’?” Daugherty tells PEOPLE. “The medical examiner claimed she could not have enunciated anything. There’s no way she made the statement ‘Eric’ did this to me. She was unable to. … How was she supposed to know right then and there that somebody actually did it?”
Who did has not yet been determined. Tellis’ retrial is expected to last a week.
source: people.com
