81-year-old bashed with Crock-pot before fatal stabbing. Her grandson is now on trial
On the June evening in 2018, when the grandson of an 81-year-old woman said he found her stabbed to death on the living room floor of her Warner Robins home, the grandson told the police he had been too stunned to dial 911.
Instead, the grandson, Jared Randall Carter, a New York City native and former Connecticut real-estate agent who’d moved to Georgia about a year earlier to live with his grandmother, went next door and asked a neighbor to call for help.
“I was so shocked, I couldn’t even call y’all,” Carter told one of the first cops to arrive.
Details from the June 9, 2018, slaying of his paternal grandmother, Valearia Jean Mann, have begun to emerge this week in Houston County Superior Court, where Carter, 33, is on trial, accused of murdering Mann.
Investigators have said Mann died after being struck in the head with a red-ceramic dish from a Crock-pot slow cooker. She was also stabbed in the chest with a knife.
The killing is thought to have happened sometime before 8 p.m. that June evening at 77 Willow Ave. in a neighborhood between Northside High School and Houston Medical Center.
On Wednesday, the second day of testimony in Carter’s trial, a local social worker said Mann had visited her a couple of weeks before Mann was slain and told of being “afraid” of Carter.
The social worker testified that Mann seemed frail and “appeared to be weak” and said Mann told her that Carter was “lazy and did not want to do anything.”
The social worker said Mann wanted her grandson out of her house, but didn’t want the police involved. Mann, the social worker went on, also said Carter was verbally and emotionally abusive, “cussing, talking down” to her.
Prosecutors later showed jurors video clips from police officers’ body cameras at the crime scene. The videos included officers’ conversations with Carter outside his grandmother’s house in the minutes after they arrived.
Carter said he had gone for a drive early that afternoon and returned to the house. Then, he said, for more than three hours he sat in the back seat of his grandmother’s car in her driveway.
He said he was down on himself for being unemployed and wanted to be alone, not sitting around inside as he often did.
“I never went this long without a job,” he said to one of the cops. “I feel like a bum.”
When he eventually went inside, he said he saw Mann dead on the hardwood floor near her front door. He said he saw a knife and blood.
Carter said he saw his grandmother’s head “busted open” and that he shook her and tried to rouse her, saying, “Grandma! Grandma!”
“I tried my best not to touch anything. ... I want y’all to be able to solve (the case),” Carter said.
He repeated what he’d said about having a neighbor call the police because he was nervous and “I was s----ing bricks.”
Police Lt. Wayne Fisher can be heard asking Carter why he was nervous.
“Because I’m the only one here — and this happens when I leave,” Carter said.
He said his grandmother had hugged him before he went for his drive that day and told him to be careful. He also said she had told him to get a job and better himself.
“It wasn’t no argument when I left,” he said. “She was fine.”
Carter’s mother and grandmother, often two of the only people in the courtroom gallery Wednesday, traveled down from Connecticut for Carter’s trial.
“We know he didn’t do this,” his maternal grandmother, Beverly Smith, said during a recess. “We know he loved (Mann).”
Smith said that she and Carter are close and that Carter’s father had been shot to death when Carter was a child.
She said when Carter moved south to live with Mann “we really felt like he was gonna go places.”
Testimony in the trial was expected to resume Thursday.
This story was originally published April 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM.