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Only the few could know and love her

There's no doubt Jessica Lunsford was a friendly child, but she was cautious enough not to let just anyone in.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published July 11, 2006

HOMOSASSA - Jessica Marie Lunsford, 9½ years old and not quite 5 feet tall, in the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 2005, was taken from her room in her family's tidy, cared-for double-wide in southwestern Citrus County, raped in a nearby mobile home and buried alive in black plastic trash bags. The trial of John Evander Couey, who is accused of killing Jessica, started this week with jury selection in Tavares and testimony set to start in Inverness after that. But here in Homosassa, where it's quiet and still, now might be a particularly, poignantly appropriate time for a reminder of who she was before her name and her face became synonymous with a law and a cause.

"You want to go see Jessie's room?" Ruth Lunsford asked Saturday morning after a breakfast of bacon and biscuits and gravy.

"Come on," she said.

She opened the door with the construction paper sign that her granddaughter made with pink Magic Marker telling people to knock to get in. It's a memorial now more than it is a little girl's lived-in room. But there are still stuffed animal bears and dolphins and dogs on the low, thin bed and books likes the Seaside Bible for Children and The Tale of Jemimah Puddleduck.

"In the morning," Lunsford said, "I say, 'Good morning, Jessie,' and at night, I say, 'Good night, Jessie.' "

She opened the blinds.

Dark turned to light.

Jessica Lunsford was born Oct. 6, 1995, at Gaston Memorial Hospital in Gastonia, N.C., and her parents divorced when she was 1. She moved to Citrus County in March 2004 and lived with her grandparents and her dad. Mark Lunsford drove a dump truck.

She went to birthday parties at Roller Barn in Inverness and went with her dad to sing songs by Pink and Shania Twain at karaoke Saturday nights at the Saloon Bar & Grill, a short drive up U.S. 19. She went to Faith Baptist Church not far from her home and usually sat toward the back in the center section of pews.

She went to a tutor for math and spelling.

She couldn't watch TV until her homework was done. That was a Ruth Lunsford rule.

She kept a neat room and matched the nail polish on her fingers and toes. She liked to mop the floor and vacuum the rug.

She liked noodles with only butter and scrambled eggs with no yolks and Fruit Loops and curly fries at Hardee's and Winnie the Pooh.

She liked to do cartwheels and handsprings.

She did not like the dark.

She had a night light and kept a flashlight by her bed.

She slept with a stuffed tiger.

"She was very outgoing and friendly," Faith Baptist pastor William LaVerle Coats said Sunday night, "but was also kind of shy in some other respects."

She minded her manners and her elders. But she was more bashful and wary around folks she didn't know.

"She's not a person that just makes friends with everybody that is around her, you know," Sharon Armstrong, her tutor, told Citrus County sheriff's Detective Gary Atchison the first week that Jessica was gone. "She is more cautious about ..."

"Who she lets in her world?" Atchison said.

"Jessie don't like other people going in her room," Ruth Lunsford told Atchison the first day she was missing.

When Jessica went outside, Ruth Lunsford said later, "I can go to the front door and say, 'Jessie,' you know, holler, 'Jessie,' and she'll be right here at the driveway. ... She don't go around no block, no, nothing like that, because she just don't trust people."

"I don't blame her," Atchison said.

Still, though, she was fun and funny, said those who knew her, and curious and responsible, and sensitive and happy.

"She usually calls me one or two nights a week to tell me what she got on her spelling test or what she got on her math test or something," Armstrong told the detective. "She did say recently she got a 97 on her spelling test.

"She was real proud of that."

She liked to go with her dad to the beaches along the Gulf Coast, and when they went south of St. Petersburg, she loved the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

"Because it was so big," Mark Lunsford said Saturday. "It was so high."

When she was younger, she used to ride, on the back roads of North Carolina, on the back of her dad's Yamaha motorcycle. He said she was the best passenger he ever had. She had good balance and reached up with her hands.

"Faster, Daddy! Faster!"

She had the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test coming up.

She had a school variety show in which she was going to sing.

She had a contest for her King's Kids youth group for the following week at church, for which she had memorized Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."

She wanted to be a fashion designer, or a singer, or an Olympic swimmer. She was going to take lessons in the summer at Bicentennial Park Pool in Crystal River.

She had started wearing a little bit of eye shadow and blush.

"I wanted her to be clean," Ruth Lunsford said in her room Saturday morning. "I wanted her to be nice. I wanted her to have good manners. I wanted her to be a lady."

Early Monday morning, as the sun came up over Fountains Memorial Park, there was a red lollipop and a piece of orange Starburst candy and a spinning silver pinwheel at her grave under three tall pines in a quiet corner of the cemetery.

Over closer to the coast, at the playground built in her honor behind the main building at Homosassa Elementary School, the summer sounds of birds and bugs came from the trees and the palm scrubs on the other side of a chain-link fence.

And at the base of the street sign at S Sonata Avenue and W Cardinal Street, next to the flowers and the weathered stuffed animal angels, there were two new, shiny red balloons with messages written in black block letters.

They said she was missed.

They said they won't forget.

Back on the night of Feb. 23, 2005, King's Kids ended at 8.

"She wasn't a big talker, but she would look up and hug me, and grab onto my hand and squeeze onto my hand and then let my hand go," teacher Kim Bidlack said Monday afternoon. "That night, she hugged me around the neck and looked up, said, 'Bye, Miss Kim, I'll see you Sunday.' "

Armstrong, the tutor, drove her home and said Jessica sang a song from Annie on the way.

The sun will come out

Tomorrow

Bet your bottom dollar

That tomorrow

There'll be sun!

When Jessica got home, Ruth Lunsford told the detective the next afternoon, "she bathed, washed her head and went in there and told her daddy, she said, 'In case that you're not here when I get done with my bath, I just want to give you a hug and tell you I love you.' She does this all the time. She calls her daddy continually on the telephone at work: 'Hi, Dad, I love you.' ...

"And so she done all those things, and it was almost 10, and I said, 'Jessie, if you don't turn that water off, our well's going to run dry.' 'Okay, Grandma, I'm almost done.' We got a time on it. Ten minutes. 'I'm almost done.' I said, 'Okay.' So then that's the time she went in to tell her daddy good night, and she come back and she cleaned up her bathroom, and she got her bed clothes on ...

"She's got her own alarm clock, and we've got ours, and hers is sitting just like on her night stand, just like mine is on mine. We set our clocks for 5, quarter to 5, and that's when - I usually don't have to go in there and say, 'Jessie, time to get up.' She usually comes in here and says, 'Grandma, come on, let's go. ...' "

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified July 11, 2006, 13:30:57]