Jury issues verdict in stabbing, Crock-pot beating murder of Houston County grandma
The live-in grandson of an 81-year-old Warner Robins woman killed nearly three years ago when she was struck in the head with a ceramic Crock-pot dish and stabbed in the chest with a chef’s knife was found guilty Friday of murdering her.
A jury of nine women and three men deliberated for about two and a half hours in Houston County Superior Court before convicting Jared Randall Carter of murder and aggravated assault in the June 2018 slaying of his paternal grandmother, Valearia Jean Mann.
Carter, who faces a minimum of 30 years behind bars and a maximum of life without parole, will be sentenced later.
The slain grandmother and her grandson, originally from New York City, had at times, according to prosecution witnesses, had a contentious relationship in the year after Carter, now 33, came south to live with Mann at her Willow Avenue home near Northside High School.
Carter was arrested after being questioned by the police in the hours after he asked a neighbor to call 911 the night of Mann’s death, June 9, 2018.
Carter at the time said he had walked in to find Mann dead on her living floor. He has since been held at the Houston County jail.
Prosecutors theorized that Carter “exploded” and assaulted his grandmother because she wanted him to move out. Her boyfriend in Connecticut was said to have been about to come down to live with her.
A social worker and a police detective testified earlier in the trial, which began Tuesday, that Mann had reached out to them for help, telling them that Carter had been emotionally and verbally abusive and that she feared him.
Mann, they said, stopped short of asking the authorities to intervene as she hoped to persuade her grandson to leave the house.
She asked that the detective give her a week to handle the situation on her own. That was in early June of 2018. About 8 p.m. the night of June 9, she was found dead.
Carter took the witness stand in his own defense Friday morning said he and Mann “were very close” and that she had been a second mother to him.
He spoke of moving to Georgia after losing his job as life-skills instructor for people with mental disabilities in the late summer of 2017. He said he’d had no luck finding work in Warner Robins.
He had told a detective interrogating him the night of the killing that being unemployed and broke left him feeling “like a bum.” Informed then of his grandmother’s feelings about him, Carter said he’d had no idea his she wanted him out of the house.
In court Friday when his attorney, Claudia Meier asked him if he had killed his grandmother, Carter replied, “No, I didn’t.”
In her closing argument, prosecutor Alicia Gassett told the jury that the frail, 100-pound Mann died “in the most heinous and unimaginable way.”
She showed them the suspected murder weapon, a roughly foot-long, black-handled chef’s knife from Mann’s kitchen.
Gassett spoke of the smashed ceramic Crock-pot dish that Mann’s attacker, referring to the 6-foot-6 Carter, had cleaned up and put in the trash after the slaying.
“It shows you how much force this man used on this tiny ... 81-year-old woman,” Gassett said.
The prosecutor also recounted the testimony of one of Mann’s friends, who said Mann had confided in her that “if something ever happens to me, (Carter) did it.”
This story was originally published April 9, 2021 at 7:21 PM.