After spending two years in jail, a Dacula woman acquitted of fatally stabbing her husband said she is ready to close the chapter on her failed marriage.
A Gwinnett County jury on Monday found 47-year-old Laurie Alexander not guilty of murder in the Dec. 8, 2007, death of Kent Alexander. Her defense attorney, Jeffrey Sliz, argued that the stabbing could have been an act of self-defense, an accident or a suicide. Alexander claimed she had very little memory of what happened.
"I believed she didn't do this knowingly and intentionally from the year I represented her and I still believe that," Sliz said Tuesday.
A few hours after being released from jail on Monday afternoon, a grateful and relieved Alexander drove through the night to a suburb of Pittsburgh, Penn., to reunite her aging parents and 22-year-old daughter.
"You really don't think anything like this will happen to you, not in a million years," said Alexander, reached by phone at her parents' home. "I pretty much was just your ordinary Dacula housewife with a little dog and a cat, and a husband who was a raging alcoholic that nobody knew anything about."
Details about Laurie and Kent Alexander that emerged during the trial could have made their way into a soap opera. Kent Alexander was an alcoholic who was hooked on prescription medications and heavily in debt, facts which the prosecution never disputed.
Alexander said her husband, a former Chicago Cubs minor league pitcher-turned-medical recruiter, was a man so charming he could "sell ice cubes to an Eskimo." He seemed confident and successful, but it was all a facade, she said. He had been fired from his job after his boss learned he was swapping prescription pills with co-workers. Adding to those troubles, Alexander said her husband had been having a long-term affair, which she discovered on the night of Dec. 7, 2007, when she caught him sending text messages to a married lover.
Alexander told police she didn't remember what happened after the confrontation. She said she took two anti-anxiety pills, went to bed, and woke the following day to find her husband dead on the kitchen floor. On the witness stand, however, Alexander testified that in later months she remembered her husband slamming her into a cabinet. She also remembered seeing the kitchen knife on the counter, but she did not recall stabbing him.
Alexander said Tuesday that when she thinks about her husband, "I feel very sad about what happened to him, but I feel that he ruined a lot of lives."
She looks at life differently now.
"Every day is a gift," Alexander said. "I'm not going to let anyone take any day away from me."
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