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She knows the facts but believes her son

Edna Jenkins' youngest is accused of raping and killing a 9-year-old girl. She says there are some things her boy wouldn't do.

By JAMAL THALJI
Published September 12, 2005

When the long-awaited trial of Gary Steven Cannon starts today, jurors will hear how 9-year-old Sharra Ferger was lured from her Blanton home, abducted, sexually assaulted and stabbed until she died in the predawn eight years ago.

They will learn that she was found nearly naked, face down, stabbed 46 times, with a deep bite wound on her left shoulder.

They will be told that there is a one in 172-million chance that DNA taken from a hair found on her body could have come from someone other than Cannon.

They will listen to witnesses, including former jail inmates, say Cannon and co-defendant Gary Elishi Cochran confessed to bingeing on drugs before attacking Cochran's niece.

The state will try to persuade jurors to send Cannon, 25, to prison for the rest of his life.

None of it, Edna Jenkins said, has anything to do with who her son really is.

"People who are condemning my son do not know my son," she said. "They only know what they want to know. They don't know the good in him."

So who, then, is Gary Steven Cannon?

* * *

He was born Sept. 4, 1980, at Dade City's old Jackson Memorial Hospital. For young Steven, his mother and older siblings Larry, Chrissy and Billy, their story comes down to this: A girl who spent years in foster care becomes a single mother with four kids, bouncing from rural east Pasco to urban Philadelphia and back again, living on the financial edge, surviving Mom's crack addiction, enduring her failed relationships with men who always fell well, well shy of fatherhood.

Cannon is now in year six of a 15-year sentence for robbing, then breaking the neck of a 70-year-old man to feed his crack cocaine addiction.

That's not the Steven she remembers.

That Steven liked Spider-Man and Superman comic books, grew up on Bruce Springsteen tapes, was into music, cartoons and drawing.

Yet there were hints of what was to come. Once, Jenkins passed out, drinking herself to sleep after a bout with depression. Steven, maybe 6, 7 or 8 at the time, finished off her potent drink.

Father figures were harder to come by.

Gary Steven Cannon was named after Gary Francis Cannon, who isn't his biological father - of whom all Jenkins will say is that he's dead.

Cannon Sr. was the guy she was seeing then, the one who signed the birth certificate. He was the closest thing to a father that young Steven knew. He got him into comics and music, sending him tapes.

Son and ex-father last saw each other in 1991, Jenkins said.

It got bad, Jenkins said, in 1994. Cannon was 14 and already addicted, abusing alcohol and marijuana. He was a truant and had frequent, and sometimes violent, brushes with the law as a juvenile.

Jenkins and her new husband, Ron, who married in 1994, couldn't rein Cannon in. Mom even had him committed once. It didn't work. Cannon was released without treatment.

He racked up more convictions as he neared adulthood.

Jenkins doesn't trust the system. She doesn't trust the evidence against her son, or the witnesses who will testify.

The DNA? "One strand of hair does not prove that he was there," she said, "or involved."

* * *

Karen Ferger Patti will hear none of that.

"You have to be sick to kill a child," said Patti, Sharra's mother, who will testify this week. "I think (Cannon and Cochran) are sick in the head."

So why does Jenkins cling stubbornly to her son's innocence? Why does she think, after watching him cross every other line, that there is still one line he would never cross?

The answer: her drug habit. Even on her worst days addicted to crack cocaine, smoking $500 to $1,000 worth a day, Jenkins said, there were still some things she would not do.

She has seen Cannon with her grandchildren. There are still some things she said her son would not do, too, like first-degree murder, or raping a child.

"It is possible, even for the worst human being on the face of the earth, to have some limitations to what they're willing to do," Jenkins said.

If something has gone right in their troubled lives, she said, it is this: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that juveniles cannot be executed.

Cannon was 17 when Sharra was killed.

"The only thing good coming out of this is God answered one of my prayers," Jenkins said. "At least they can't put him to death."

A version of this story appeared in some regional editions of the Times.

[Last modified September 12, 2005, 03:15:25]