The widow and daughter of the man Brandon Astor Jones murdered in 1979 don't plan to watch his execution, scheduled for Tuesday evening.
They will be together at the Cherokee County home of Katie King, who was 7 when her father was killed.
“I will be at peace, being with my mom,” said King, referring to Christine Bixon.
Bixon — who was Christine Tackett until she remarried four years after her husband's murder — said she did not attend the execution of Jones' co-defendant Van Roosevelt Solomon 30 years ago and she doesn't plan to attend the one set for Tuesday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison outside Jackson.
But Zuberi Solomon, who was 2 when his father and Jones murdered convenience store manager Roger Tackett, has asked the Department of Corrections to allow him to be a witness. He has not received an answer.
He said he wanted to “see the face of the person that destroyed two families.”
“They’ve lost their father (and husband),” Solomon said. “You feel sympathy for them. I definitely know what it feels like. Senseless.”
Zuberi Solomon says all the blame for the murder should go to Jones and not his father, a one-time Baptist preacher who by then had a painting business. Jones worked for Van Roosevelt Solomon.
Zuberi Solomon said Jones forced his father at gunpoint to drive from Atlanta’s West End to Cobb County so he could buy drugs and it was Jones who decided they should break into the Tenneco on Delk Road. He said his father did not shoot Tackett, even though police found two guns that had been fired and gunshot residue on the hands of both men.
Solomon and Jones were arrested because Cobb County police Officer Ray Kendall was outside the store when Tackett was shot. The officer had driven a stranded motorist to the Tenneco to use a pay phone and became suspicious when he found Tackett’s car parked in front with the driver’s side door open. Kendall was looking through a window when Jones peeked out of the storeroom door.
Kendall found Tackett lying in a pool of his own blood inside the storeroom, shot once in the thumb and twice in the hip and the head.
Each suspect blamed the other for firing the shot that killed Tackett.
Van Roosevelt Solomon, who had been in prison in Oklahoma, was electrocuted in 1985.
Jones’ case was delayed when a federal judge ordered that he be resentenced because jurors in the first trial had a Bible during deliberations. In 1997 a second Cobb County jury said Jones should die for his crime.
“It’s been a nagging thing,” Zuberi Solomon said of the 30 years that have passed between his father’s execution and the date Jones is scheduled to die by lethal injection. The now 38-year-old man has two sons who are around the age he was when his own father was put to death.
On Feb. 22, 1985, Van Roosevelt Solomon became the fifth person Georgia executed once the death penalty was reinstated.
“As a kid, I thought, ‘My father has been put to death for a murder. So why is he (Jones) still alive? One person has been punished for this and another person is still here.’ That makes absolutely no sense.”
Zuberi Solomon said he’d actually thought Jones had been executed, until he heard a newscast about Jones’ pending lethal injection. “I didn’t know he was in prison this long,” he said.
If Jones is executed, he will be the oldest man Georgia has put to death. His execution date is 11 days before his 73rd birthday.
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