commentary by Patrick H. Moore
We’ve got us a really sad one here, friends, but a story with more than a modicum of hope and heroism. It’s always heartbreaking to see a beautiful and apparently charming young mother battered with a baseball bat and then shot dead by her war-ravaged boyfriend, who then almost immediately turns the gun on himself, but what would be mere pathos is elevated into something more precious when the lovely young mother dies with her baby in her arms and – somewhat miraculously – manages to save her child from the bat-and-gun-wielding madman in a most unlikely fashion.
Pete Combs of WBSRadio begins our tragic yet uplifting story with the following lead-in:
“She was young, beautiful and tragically killed by her daughter’s father early Sunday morning. Now, Jessica Arrendale, 33, is being hailed by her family as a hero for saving her six-month old daughter’s life, even as she died from a bullet to the head.”
In an exclusive interview with Pete Combs, Jessica’s mother, Teresa Inniello, recounted “the sad details of her daughter’s death and the miraculous survival of her granddaughter, Cobie.”
“It began Saturday night when Jessica and Cobie’s father, 30-year old Antoine Davis, went out for the evening. At some point, Ionniello said, Davis, a former Marine who served in Iraq, became belligerently drunk and abusive. It had happened many times, Ionniello said, but her daughter did not seem able to turn Davis away no matter how often he abused her.”
Thus begins the disturbing tale of an angry, drunken (and probably severely depressed) man taking out his anger and frustration on his relatively helpless girlfriend, who also happens to be the mother of his child. How, where, and why so many men choose to sink this far below ground is beyond me yet it happens with disheartening regularity.
Of course, there are steps along the trail of this descent into the depths. Generally speaking, the fiend will not slaughter the princess out in public; rather, the star-crossed couple will return home, the fiend’s towering rage growing ever stronger before it explodes into an appalling finale in the “sanctity” of the family home.
In this instance, Davis reportedly chased Jessica “up the stairs of her three-story townhome in the Oakdale Bluffs subdivision” of Smyrna, Georgia sometime after the witching hour, according to her mother.
Although it’s unclear who contacted them, the Smyrna police and SWAT team were called, but were understandably reluctant to invade the townhouse, fearful that aggressive actions on their part might incite irrevocable violence. So they waited a full 13 hours hoping against hope that through some miracle anger would be transmuted into calm and a cessation of hostilities.
Rather pathetically, they did send in a robot at some point but the machine was unable to negotiate the stairs in the 3-story building.
In her interview, Jessica’s mother relates that her daughter tried to defend herself from the fiend with a baseball bat, but the former serviceman overpowered her, disarmed her and struck her several times with the bat, apparently also hitting her daughter Cobie in the head. (Cobie is currently hospitalized with a traumatic head injury.)
As is so often the case in endgames of this sort, the terrified victim ended up locking herself in the bathroom, as if this would do any good. Wielding an assault rifle outfitted with a suppressor, the Fiend burst through the door and shot Jessica, who was still holding Cobie in her arms, in the head.
“He shot her and they (police) don’t know how she was able to twist her body and fall literally in the opposite direction,” Ionniello said. Instead of falling onto the floor, Ionniello said her daughter fell over the toilet, dropping little Cobie into the water-filled bowl.
“She had pure will,” Ionniello said. “She wanted that baby to live.”
Jessica’s mother believes that the Fiend intended to kill them both (or perhaps he didn’t give a damn about the now motherless child). In any event, he did what these cowards do so often – after shooting the mother, he walked into the baby’s room and shot himself.
“She was the hero,” Ionniello said, “because her last breath was saving the child.”
13 hours later, the officers finally stormed the townhouse and found the baby in the toilet, covered by her mother’s body.
Colbie remains at Children’s Health Care of Atlanta at Scottish Rite Hospital. Her grandmother hopes to bring her home soon, where she will join her and Jessica’s 15-year old daughter whom she was already caring for.
According to Hilary Hanson of the Huffington Post, Jessica’s friend, Leslie Tidwell Jordan, set up a GoFundMe page to help defray the costs of caring for the baby, as well as Jessica’s older daughter.
Ms. Jordan states on the page that Jessica was the “sole provider for her household”, which, if true, means that the Fiend is not only a murderer of a young mother; he also did not work. The Fund is doing well and as of Tuesday morning, $33,000 had already been raised.
There are allegedly two sides to every story, and the AP reports that according to Tamaira Chesley, who has two children with Davis, he was a good man and a dedicated Marine, who struggled with severe depression and was often sad.
This is no doubt true and we all know that WAR IS HELL and my heart goes out to every military man who served in the Iraqi war, or any war for that matter, but that does not justify killing the mother of his other child. It simply does not and unless Davis was clinically insane, rather than just drunk, furious and stupid over probably very little, there is no excuse at all for what he did.
But whether it was intentional or merely a fortuitous accident, Jessica does appear to have saved her 6-month-old daughter from the Davis’s mindless wrath, and we can only hope that with the help of her grandmother and supportive friends, this now motherless child can grow up to live a life characterized by wholesome values and real accomplishment.