A 22-year-old Little Rock man who ambushed his ex-girlfriend in the Verizon Arena parking lot after rehearsal for her 2013 high school graduation was sentenced to 55 years in prison on Monday for attempted capital murder.
Christian Jackson shot himself in the head immediately after wounding 20-year-old Jasmine Denise Fisher, then a Parkview High School senior, three times in the stomach after ambushing her from inside her car. Because she broke up with him, Jackson had already threatened to shoot her while she was on stage getting her diploma, she said.
Fisher said Jackson, with a gun in his hand, asked her if their relationship was really over. He started shooting when she said it was.
Bleeding on the ground, Fisher said, she heard the gun "clicking" and saw Jackson fiddling with it before he raised the revolver toward his head. She said she turned away so she wouldn't see what he was going to do. She looked back only after that last shot was fired, and rescuers were trying to move her away. She thought Jackson was dead.
But he survived and pleaded guilty in April to attempted capital murder. He will have to serve almost 14 years before he can qualify for parole. The 55-year sentence was the harshest available below a life sentence.
Two years after the shooting, the scars on her stomach still pain her every day and sometimes bleed, Fisher told Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen on Monday. She said they hurt her when she was on the witness stand Monday, describing for the judge what Jackson had done to her.
The scars will never go away and won't stop hurting, she said. Doctors say laser surgery, which she can't afford, might ease the pain some but won't completely remove the marks, which she showed to the judge. There was some concern the wounds would affect her internally when she got pregnant, but the injuries did not keep her from giving birth, she said. They don't hurt her when she picks up her 1-year-old, Fisher told the judge.
Fisher said she has to be careful about what she wears. Some clothes hurt while others reveal too much, and when that happens, she is asked questions about things she does not want to remember.
"If they see it, they ask," Fisher told the judge. "I try to put it in the back of my head. But when they ask, it brings it all up again."
Fisher's mother, Sherry Fisher, testified she worries about her daughter whenever Jasmine Fisher is out of her sight.
"I'm scared every time she leaves out," Fisher told the judge, calling her survival a "miracle." "I'm worried someone will do this again."
And her daughter's fears are catching, Fisher testified, saying she's adopted her daughter's habit of always checking the backseat before she gets into the car.
Deputy prosecutor Jeanna Sherrill called for a life sentence, asking the judge to think about all the steps Jackson took to go after Jasmine Fisher. He had to get a gun, go to Verizon Arena, get into her locked car and wait for her, the prosecutor said. When she ran, he chased her, held her, then shot her when she told him the relationship was over, Sherrill said. There was evidence that he had to pull the trigger 12 times to fire the four shots that wounded them both, she said.
Jackson showed no mercy when he had the chance, and he gave Fisher a life sentence of "scars she has to see every day, scars she has to feel every day," the prosecutor said. "We're here for the court to send a message that if someone tries with all of their might to kill someone, this is the sentence they get."
With sentencing guidelines suggesting a 40-year term, defense attorney Ron Davis urged the judge not to impose such a harsh sentence, pointing to cases in which murderers and rapists have gotten less. With both victim and assailant escaping grievous injury, Davis suggested they had been spared for a reason.
"There is a higher plan, and I don't think the court should get in the way," he said.
Jackson's parents, Michael Jackson and Angela Matthews, with his sister Miracle Jackson and best friend Craig Owens pleaded for mercy from the judge.
The defendant first indicated he would testify Monday, then backed out. Allowed to speak before sentencing, Jackson apologized to Fisher, her family and his own.
But the last word was left to the judge, who told those in the courtroom that he'd heard a lot about love and how much Jackson had felt for Fisher.
"It's the position of this judge that love does not try to kill the object of its affection. That's oppression," Griffen said. "Love liberates. Love respects the freedom of others to move on. Love does not say, 'if I can't have you, no one else will.' That's something else."
Metro on 06/02/2015