Jailed at 12, youngest convicted killer now free at 29

MELBOURNE, Fla. — Curtis Fairchild Jones walked into prison a 12-year-old boy. On Tuesday morning, he walked out a 29-year-old man.

Prison officials confirmed that Jones was released from South Bay Correctional Facility, just south of Lake Okeechobee, shortly after 7 a.m. Jones has refused all interview requests from Florida Today and his attorney said there will be no statement made to the media.

He leaves prison a convicted murderer, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, a brother to a sister scheduled to be released from prison Saturday, and an ordained minister. Time will tell if he has had a chance to work through the demons that terrorized his childhood and drove him to take a life.

Curtis — along with Catherine, his older sister by a year — shot and killed their father’s girlfriend, Sonya Nicole Speights in 1999. They also had planned to kill their father and a male relative who they said was sexually molesting them. No one believed they were being abused, even after investigators from what is now the Department of Children and Families identified evidence of the abuse.

The siblings shot Speights with their father's handgun, hitting her four times out of nine bullets fired.

They immediately realized their tragic blunder, tried to cover up the crime and ran to a neighbor's house to say it was an accident. They eventually fled to a wooded area where they hid for the night before Brevard County Sheriff's investigators found them near their Port St. John home on the morning of Jan. 7, 1999.

“The story of siblings Catherine Jones and Curtis Fairchild is a tragic tale of several people and systems that failed these two young victims before dumping them in prison,” said Ashley Nellis, senior research analyst with the Sentencing Project — a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group working to promote changes in sentencing policy among other reforms related to incarceration. “It seems that even a cursory look at their childhood environment and the backgrounds of their caretakers would have prompted grave concern and care rather than stiff prison terms.”

But facing life in prison after Brevard County, Fla., prosecutors made the kids the youngest ever charged as adults with first-degree murder, they remained quiet about the abuse. They pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and accepted the sentence of 18 years and probation for life.

There was no trial. There was no testimony. There was no opportunity to present the documentation from the agency that showed welfare investigators found signs on more than one occasion that the siblings were being abused by a family member. That same family member had already been convicted of sexually assaulting his girlfriend's daughter in 1993.

"It is somewhat haunting to me that there was a world of horrors that this child was growing up in that was never explored,” said Curtis Jones’ attorney Alan Landman. “As a lawyer, we are only as effective as the information given to us by our clients or that which we can glean from the charges and the discovery received by the State. There was absolutely no indication in the entire case of what was truly going on behind the scenes and in the life of Curtis and his sister.”

In confidential documents revealed to Florida Today by an attorney working to gain the children clemency several years ago, it was revealed that the Department of Children and Families said there were indications of abuse but did nothing.

No one had to die in this case. Speights’ own children had to grow up without a mother. Many suffered, but Catherine said during an interview from prison that at one point she was “happy to be away” and felt “safe” in prison.

When Catherine Jones is released Saturday, at the age of 30, she will depart Hernando Correctional Institution as a married woman. She married Navy Senior Chief Ramous K. Fleming in November 2013 after the two became pen pals.

“I can only wish Curtis and his sister the best that life has to offer under circumstances which no child should have to endure,” Landman said.

Nellis echoed that. “With the support of loving friends and supporters it won't be long before they are back on their feet and enjoying their much-deserved freedom,” she said.