Margaret Sheffield was “the sweetest 77-year-old lady,” grandmother to a dozen children and great-grandmother to six more. She was a homemaker and a cancer survivor.
On Friday morning, her son-in-law found her stabbed multiple times inside her home.
“She’s all bloody on the floor and everything, and everything else,” he told a Gwinnett County 911 dispatcher while weeping in the driveway. “She’s gone.”
Gwinnett County police believe 16-year-old James Watkins, a neighbor who was known to Sheffield, killed her sometime in the preceding 24 hours. Theft is the alleged motive, but what — if anything — was taken from the home on Dacula's Track Way remained unclear Monday.
“It was noticed upon arrival that the front door and back door were unlocked,” a brief police incident report said, “but nothing else in the house appeared to be tampered with.”
Watkins had a preliminary hearing Saturday morning at the Gwinnett County jail, but is being held at a Gainesville youth detention center on murder, aggravated assault and burglary charges. Police released his name because he is being charged as an adult.
According to her obituary, Sheffield was born April 14, 1938, in Petersburg, Va., and had ties to Hartwell, a lakeside town near Georgia’s northeast border with South Carolina. Grandson Bradley Stamaris declined to speak with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution but wrote on Facebook that his grandmother — known as Maw Maw — “could barely see and was very hard of hearing.”
“But she was wonderful, thoughtful, and caring,” he wrote. “You would never know the pain she was going through because she would never let you see it. She was strong, she was our rock.”
In addition to her gaggle of grand- and great-grandchildren, she is survived by three daughters, a son and nine siblings. Her husband, Leslie, died from overexposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, Stamaris wrote.
Visitation services are scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Strickland Funeral Home of Hartwell. Services will be held at the funeral home at 11 a.m. Wednesday, with burial to follow at Reed Creek Baptist Church.
“Please send many prayers to my family. From whatever God you believe in,” Stamaris said. “If not keep us in your thoughts, and spread some love to your own families. You never know when it could hit this close to home.”
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