By Steve Visser
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — Renalda Blount is plain worn out waiting for justice.
Nearly six years ago, the retired Army sergeant was in bed with her window open in her south Fulton County neighborhood when she heard gunshots come from the nearby Red Oak community.
“I thought, ‘Wow, somebody got hurt. l’ll have to ask Baby Boy tomorrow what happened,’ ” she said in an interview Saturday.
“Baby Boy,” was her 26-year-old son, Aaron Blount, a police officer who patrolled that part of the county. An hour or so later came the knock at her door.
“Ma’am,” the police lieutenant said, “your son has been in an accident.”
Officer Blount had stopped a car that evening, April 22, 2003. It pulled over at the Red Oak Coastal filling station on Roosevelt Highway. The driver got out and, as the officer slowed to a stop, opened fire.
One of the bullets hit Blount in the shoulder, another in the head. As the two-year police veteran lay wounded, the gunman got another pistol from his car.
“He put that gun to the back of Aaron’s head and shot him again,” said Ron Boyter, a former Fulton County prosecutor who worked the case.
“Blount did nothing wrong. He was getting married and had been looking at wedding invitations in his car,” Boyter said. “His blood spills all over his wedding invitations.”
Police quickly built an ironclad case against Kenneth Reese, then also 26, based on eyewitnesses and forensic evidence. The suspect had fled to Miami and was arrested while waiting to board a Greyhound bus.
District Attorney Paul Howard announced his intention to seek the death penalty --- as is standard in cases involving the murder of a police officer --- but the case was repeatedly delayed.
Today --- after sitting in the Fulton County jail for half a decade --- Reese is expected to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life without parole.
Renalda Blount said Howard told her last week that the state’s own psychiatrist had found the 300-pound Reese, who had no other criminal record, may have suffered from a psychosis brought on from a now-banned drug he was taking for weight loss when he killed her son.
“He was psychotic,” said Tom West, one of Reese’s lawyers. “No jury in Fulton County is going to give somebody who is psychotic the death penalty.”
Renalda Blount said her major complaint was the years it has taken to resolve a case in which mental illness was suspected early on. It was delayed for reasons common to death penalty cases. It also bounced from judge to judge after three recused themselves because of conflicts.
A fourth judge, Rowland Barnes, was shot to death by Brian Nichols in 2005.
Nichols, who also mounted a mental health defense, received a sentence of life without parole in December for killing Barnes and three other people after the man escaped from custody during his rape trial.
Blount said the Nichols case delayed Reese’s case for three more years because it got priority in Howard’s office. “I was offended,” she said.
She primarily blamed the defense lawyers for repeated delays --- saying she believed they were part of a strategy to make a plea more palatable.
West and his co-counsel, Dwight Thomas, said the delays weren’t their fault.
“It took a long time, and it was frustrating to everybody, but it was for legitimate reasons,” Thomas said.
Blount said while she initially wanted the death penalty --- “that is a mother’s rage” --- she is supportive of the plea if only to put the case behind her and her grandson, who was 1 year old when his father was killed.
Blount suffers from multiple sclerosis and said the stress of waiting on a resolution has been hard on her health.
She knows years of appeals would only be worse if the district attorney insisted on winning a conviction at trial.
“I had waited six years to confront him, and now he is taking the easy way out,” she said of Reese. “But it is going to be over, and that’s important to me.
“What I want will never happen,” she said. “I want my son to walk back through that door.”
Copyright 2009 Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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