The mother of five children who were killed by their father has pleaded with a jury not to sentence her ex-husband to death, as she told the court that her kids “loved him”.
Timothy Jones Jr. was found guilty of five counts of murder after he killed all five of his young children, aged between one and eight, in North Carolina, USA, back in 2014.
A jury will now decide if the convicted murderer should receive the death penalty for his crimes, reports the Daily Mail, however his ex-wife Amber Kyzer surprisingly pleaded for mercy for her former partner for the sake of her deceased children.
“He did not show my children any mercy by any means,” she reportedly told the court on Tuesday. “But my kids loved him and if I’m speaking on behalf of my kids and not myself, that’s what I have to say.”
She added: “I hear what my kids went through and what they endured. And as a mother, if I could personally rip his face off I would. That’s the mom in me. That’s the mama bear.”
Kyzer and Jones’ marriage allegedly broke down after the former grew tired of her husband trying to control what she wore and when she left the house, with the mother-of-five leaving the family home to move in with a teenager next door.
The killer’s lawyers are attempting to prove that Jones was suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness which was heightened when he became a single father to the couple’s children. In his confession, he said he felt that his six-year-old son Nahtahn was conspiring with Kyzer to attack him, which led to him exercising the body until he collapsed and died, after he broke an electrical outlet.
Just hours after Nahtahn’s death, according to the Daily Mail, Jones made the decision to kill his four other children. He strangled Merah, eight, and Elias, seven, with his own hands, before using a belt to strangle the youngest two kids, Gabriel, two, and Abigail, one, to death.
Kyzer’s testimony came after details of Jones’ own harrowing upbringing were laid bare in court by social worker Deborah Grey, who revealed the convicted killer’s father was born to a 12-year-old rape victim.
Grey also claimed that Jones’ mother Cynthia had schizophrenia and was admitted to a mental institution when the convicted killer was three-years-old. According to multiple news reports, her records claim that she told doctors she was molested by her own father and locked in a closet with a “dead chicken dripping blood on her” as part of a voodoo ritual.