On Oct. 29, 2000, 22-year-old Toyal Edwana Jackson told her college roommates she was heading to Walmart and left her apartment.
It was the last time her friends saw her alive.
“She just kind of fell off the face of the earth,” a Carrollton deputy police chief told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution days after the college senior’s disappearance.
On Nov. 30, 2000, Jackson’s body was found at a city wastewater treatment facility. Police have been looking for the person responsible for her death since then. On Wednesday, a suspect was indicted.
On Wednesday, a Carroll County grand jury indicted Samuel Lewis Edwards on six counts of murder, the district attorney and Carrollton Police Department announced in an emailed statement. Edwards, 35, is accused of strangling Jackson and then stabbing her, according to the indictment.
At the time of his indictment, Edwards was being held in the Heard County jail on unrelated charges, according to Jeff Hunt, a senior assistant district attorney. Late Wednesday, a spokesman for the Heard jail said Edwards had been released to Carroll County deputies. Edwards was later booked into the Carroll jail.
Neither the DA nor Carrollton police commented publicly on the indictment.
“Because this is a pending case, the District Attorney’s Office and the Carrollton Police Department will be making no further comments,” an emailed statement said. “At this time, the family of Toyal Jackson does not wish to make a public statement and asks that members of the press please respect the family’s privacy.”
Jackson, of DeKalb County, was a senior at the State University of West Georgia at the time of her death. She had changed her major from physical education to early childhood education and was working as an assistant coach to the eighth grade girls’ basketball team at Carrollton Junior High School, a roommate previously said.
Jackson was a standout on the girls’ basketball team at Henderson High School.
Before Jackson’s body was found, a witness told Carrollton police that he saw a stocky man pushing a female into the driver’s side of a red Nissan pickup truck, approximately a 1989 or 1990 model, on the night Jackson disappeared.
Information on how Edwards was recently linked to the crime was not released.
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