Before her stepmother could find the words, Angela Sampler said, she knew her mother was dead.

"She said ‘I have something to tell you,’ and I just had this feeling. I went ballistic. I started yelling ‘What happened to my mom?’" Sampler, now 40, told a Palm Beach County jury Wednesday.

It was 1987 then, and Sampler was 10 years old. On Wednesday, not long after prosecutor urged jurors to sentence 50-year-old Rodney Clark to death for killing Sampler’s mother, Dana Fader, Sampler said the decades faded many of the memories of the mother she shared with two younger brothers. She hardly got to see her brothers after Fader was found raped and strangled in the backseat of her car.

Still, Sampler said, she remembered the sound of her mother’s laughter, and that she laughed often.

Her mother loved them desperately, she knew that much.

But other details were long forgotten in the dull pain of the same grief that led her brother, Kenneth Coby Manis, to testify that his mother’s death makes it hard for him to trust people around his family — even now at 35 years old.

If Assistant State Attorneys Aleathea McRoberts and Reid Scott get jurors to recommend a death sentence for Clark, the Jackson, Miss., man will be the first local defendant to receive the sentence in state court in nearly two decades. His case is already the first local case where prosecutors have pursued a death sentence through trial since Florida lawmakers hurriedly revamped the state’s death penalty after a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled the old system unconstitutional.

Jurors returned a first-degree murder conviction against Clark after several hours of deliberation in the guilt phase of the trial in August, where prosecutors revealed that investigators found Clark’s sperm on the dress Fader wore that night and also linked him to a partial palm print on the outside of one of the car windows.

The panel of 12, along with two alternates, returned to court Wednesday for what was just the first half of the sentencing phase. Circuit Judge Charles Burton asked them to return next week after an extended break ahead of Hurricane Irma’s expected weekend landfall.

Childhood abuse

Before they heard from Sampler and Manis along with Fader’s brother and sister, jurors listened to opening statements from McRoberts and Palm Beach County Public Defender Carey Haughwout, who started by saying she was in an awkward position to have to ask them to spare Clark’s life just weeks after they rejected her arguments that he was innocent.

Clark’s life was one that began with oppression and went downhill from there, Haughwout said.

Born and raised in Jackson, where his sister later testified that even the graveyards are divided to separate blacks and whites, Clark through his childhood dealt with a father who abused and eventually left him, a mother who worked two jobs, possible exposure to lead poisoning from paints and pipes and bullying from classmates who ridiculed his sensitive nature by calling him "a bag of water."

He was exposed to drugs and alcohol, family curses that manifested in multiple alcoholics in the family and an aunt who would give him his first hit of cocaine. Still, an uncle testified, Clark had potential to be a good man and had qualities he hoped would eventually shine through.

"Is Rodney Clark so beyond redemption that he should die for this crime?" Haughwout asked.

Fader’s sister, Martha Jo Bailey, thinks so.

She shook her head several times in the courtroom as Haughwout recounted Clark’s troubled background and almost walked out as Haughwout chronicled the list on the now wheelchair-bound Clark’s many current ailments, which include diabetes, intestinal bleeding, an enlarged prostate, high blood pressure, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and that old cocaine habit.

Haughwout asked jurors to consider those factors when determining his punishment. Under the new laws, each of the 12 will have to agree to a death sentence to make such a recommendation to the judge.

McRoberts urged the panel to unanimously do just that by urging them to determine that several aggravating factors exist in the case. Among them, McRoberts said, was Clark’s subsequent convictions for rape and robbery in Mississippi, along with claims that he murdered Fader in a heinous, atrocious and cruel manner.

"This wasn’t just a killing," she said. "It was aggravated by the personal horrific things he did to her."

Joseph Bailey long thought of those horrific things, and said he struggled with forgiving his sister’s killer until about a year before detectives in 2012 linked Clark to the case through DNA. On the witness stand, Joseph Bailey remembered his little sister as such a fierce protector that she once beat up a classmate who bullied him because of his cerebral palsy.

On the morning of June 20, 1987, he lived with his sister and the youngest of her three children, who was 3 years old. When he told his uncle he’d gotten dressed by himself because his mommy was gone, the revelation ignited a search that ended with the discovery of Fader’s body.

Like his niece, a sense of dread overwhelmed Joseph Bailey as police surrounded his sister’s car, parked near a fence in the apartment complex. He rushed over and was several feet from the car when he said he decided he could go no farther.

He knew then that she was gone. And more than anything, he felt helpless.

"My sister was there for me so many times and I couldn’t be there for her," Kenneth Bailey said, his voice cracking. "I couldn’t be there for her when she … I couldn’t be there for her when she needed me the most."