Whose Witness Was She?

Jacqueline Horner is in a wheelchair. She raised her grandson from the time he was three years old. She is the one he calls Mimi. She took the witness stand for the defense in the capital murder trial of the man she raised, and in the morning she told the jury everything the defense built this entire mitigation case to put on the record. In the afternoon the state took her on cross for seven minutes and walked away with three closing-argument anchors that I think will outlast everything the morning gave them.

The morning was hers. The defense walked her through three generations of trauma in her own family of origin. An alcoholic father who beat her brothers with a belt. Sexual abuse she endured as a small child. Two of her six siblings dying by suicide. A generation of substance abuse that touched everyone around her. They walked her through the second husband who was her own second cousin, the man who sexually abused her four-year-old daughter Melissa before they married, while they were married, and after. They walked her through the line that may follow her into the rest of her life. She did not believe her four-year-old when Melissa told her it was happening. She married him anyway.

"It is all on me. And I live with that still."

They walked her through Tanner's chapter. The day his mother overdosed on a toilet and he came to get his grandmother because Melissa would not wake up. The transfer to the grandparents at age three or four because Melissa knew, in her mother's words, that Tanner would be safe with them. The Asperger's diagnosis from the Child Study Center. The bullying at every level of the social ladder, daycare to school to wrestling matches. The wrestling-match bully who walked up next to Tanner in front of his grandmother and started in on him. Tanner walked next to her on the way home and tried to comfort her. "Oh, it's okay, Mimi. I'm used to it."

They walked her through the stick. Bill, the third husband, a Vietnam veteran who served as a tunnel rat during the war, the man who bought Tanner his first drum set on his sixteenth birthday because the kid had been air-drumming everywhere he went. The same man who one afternoon swung a wooden dowel rod at Tanner like a baseball bat across his chest and stomach, while Jackie watched. Tanner went down like a rag doll. He came back fifteen minutes later bleeding everywhere from a cut on his arm. Ten stitches in the ER. Bill was not concerned. The state would return to this moment on cross for one specific reason.

And then, after a hundred minutes of testimony, the defense closed direct on the apology. Jackie testified about the Bible she bought her grandson after the arrest, the New and Old Testaments combined into a single book, with notes in it. About the talent show photograph from fourth grade where Tanner sang "Who Let the Dogs Out?" to his classmates. About how the family is devastated. About Tanner's parents and how she is sorry for them. About Athena Strand's family. "We think about you every day and I pray for you every day."

WATCH The Call: Killer's Grandmother Asked Him to Look for Athena Strand After Murder | Pt 62

That was the morning. The afternoon was something else. The state's cross was short, focused, and aimed at three closing-argument anchors. They got every one of them in seven minutes.

The first anchor was the stick. Counsel asked one question: how old was Tanner when his grandfather hit him with the dowel rod. Twenty-five. A grown man. The state did not press. They did not need to. The defense's family-trauma narrative ends, by the state's reckoning, before the offense year. Bill's violence at twenty-five is not childhood that shapes a brain. Bill's violence at twenty-five is a separate story.

The second anchor was right and wrong. The state walked Jackie through her own life. She had worked hard despite her struggles. She had done the best she could with what she had. She had been there for her grandson at every age and into his thirties. She had taught him how to behave and given him work ethic and given him dad advice. She had been, the state said, his mom in everything but name. "I was Mimi," Jackie answered. The state nodded that point through and turned the question. Who is responsible for putting us here today? "Tanner." Not the stress. Not the new job. Not Asperger's. He knows right from wrong, doesn't he? Yes. He knows not to kill. Yes. He knows not to sexually assault a child. Yeah. The defendant's grandmother, who raised him from age three, said it on the record, on cross, in the punishment phase. He knows right from wrong. He knows not to kill. He knows not to sexually assault a child.

The third anchor was the day after. The state asked Jackie about a phone call she made the day after Athena Strand was killed, while Tanner was working his FedEx route in Paradise, Texas. Jackie had seen Athena's missing-child photo on her television. She called her grandson and asked him to look out for the little girl. She sent him the picture. Tanner had already killed Athena. Tanner had already dumped her. His response to his grandmother was generic. "Okay, I'll look out for her." He did not dwell on it. He did not admit anything. He did not, as Jackie said in her own words, do what she would have done in his place. Which was call.

His own grandmother gave him a chance to confess. He chose to lie.

This is what closing arguments are made of. The defense will tell the jury about the family of origin, the autism, the bullying, the dowel rod, the apology. They will ask twelve people to spare his life because of what he was shaped into. The state will tell the jury that the woman who shaped him says he knows right from wrong, that the family-violence chapter ends before the offense year, and that the day after he killed a seven-year-old his grandmother gave him a chance to come clean and he chose to lie. They will not need a brain expert to make that argument. The defense's own character witness made it for them, on cross, in seven minutes.

This is what I keep coming back to. We have spent fifteen days of this trial listening to defense experts walk the jury through fetal alcohol exposure, lead poisoning, autism spectrum disorder, brain regions, neuron counts, and hormone levels. The cumulative pile of expert testimony is the broken-brain defense, and it is the entire reason this case is at trial. He pleaded guilty on Day One. He did not contest what he did. The only question is what twelve jurors decide he deserves. The defense built this case on the proposition that a man whose brain was shaped by everything stacked against him from before he was born cannot be the kind of person the Constitution permits us to execute. And then his own grandmother, the woman who provided most of the family of origin the experts have been describing, said on the record that her grandson knows right from wrong.

I do not know what twelve jurors will do with that. I do not know if the morning's emotional weight is going to outlast what the state took off her in seven minutes. What I do know is that Maitlyn Gandy heard her daughter's killer's grandmother apologize from the witness chair and pray for Athena's family every day, and what I do know is that the same grandmother told the prosecution on cross that her grandson knows not to kill a child. Whose witness was she? The defense will say hers. The state will say hers. The jury decides. That is what this is.