JAZZMEN MONTGOMERY - 6 yo (2009) - Oak Cliff/Dallas TX

A 13-year-old choked back tears on the witness stand today as he told a Dallas County jury how he was forced to look at the corpses of his murdered mother and young sister.

Gary Green

The emotional testimony came in the capital murder trial of Gary Greeen, 39. He is accused of killing his wife, Lovetta Armstead, and her 6-year-old daughter, Jazzmen Montgomery, at their South Oak Cliff home last September. Armstread was killed shortly after informing Green that she intended to get their marriage annulled, according to police and prosecutors. After Green stabbed Armstead repeatedly and drowned the little girl in the bathtub, he forced the woman's two sons to view the dead bodies, the 13-year-old testified. His younger brother was 9 at the time. The younger brother also testified, after initially bursting into tears when Green entered the courtroom.
The boy, now 10, was seated at the witness stand during a break and was all smiles while talking to attorneys. But as soon as he saw Green enter from a holding cell, he started crying. When prosecutors couldn't calm him, he was ushered from the courtroom. The jury was not in the room. The boy returned minutes later, armed with pockets full of candy. He sat down and said, "OK" in a loud voice. As the boy testified, he looked constantly at Green, who sat quietly and stared ahead throughout the day's testimony. The boy said he once cared for Green, telling jurors, "I loved him to death." The older boy, testifying first, said Green told him and his brother he had something to show them and led them into a bedroom, When they saw their mother lying on the floor, "we just fall on our knee and start crying," the boy said. They then saw their sister's body face down on the bloody floor of the bathroom. Her hands were bound behind her back with duct tape. The boy said Green ordered him to retrieve his pills, forcing him to walk through the blood on the bathroom floor. Green then left, he said, after making the boys hug him and promise not to call the police until he left. The boy said Green told them he was going to kill himself. "You know how I told you to say, 'See you later' and never 'Bye?'" the boy quoted Green as saying. "Well, this is goodbye." Earlier in the day, prosecutors introduced three letters that the couple exchanged on the day of the murders. In the first message, written on notebook paper, Armstead asked Green to move out of their home: "I know you love me and I love you but it's time we part."
In the second, she voices her regrets at allowing Green back into her life. In the final letter, submitted into evidence in his capital murder trial today, Green said he planned to kill Armstead, her three children and himself. "You asked to see the monster so here is the monster you made me!" he wrote. "They will be 5 lives taken today me being the 5th!" It’s not clear whether Armstead read the entire letter before she was stabbed 28 times in the bathroom of their home in September 2009. Dallas County prosecutors said in opening statements that the trial would lay out for jurors "the abject horror choreographed by Gary Green." If convicted of capital murder, Green, 39, will face the death penalty or life in prison without parole. At one point in his final letter to Armstead, Green reflects on his fate. "I pray that the Lord allows my soul to enter Heaven," he writes. "If not I will burn in Hell forever." The attack against Armstead was so violent, Prosecutor Andy Beach said, that when one knife broke, Green would grab another. Beach said Armstead fought back as her 6-year-old daughter, Jazzmen Montgomery, lay watching on her bed, bound with duct tape. Armstead managed to grab the knife and stab Green twice behind his shoulder. They were superficial wounds. But her stab wounds were too much and she died "a slow, painful agonizing death," Beach said. Green then grabbed the girl and drowned her in the bathtub. He would later tell police that "it was so bad, I had to turn away." A postscript of the last letter Green wrote to Armstead explained why the children were targeted. "Why the kids because they were a big part of the plot against by always talking behind my back," he wrote. The killings took place shortly after Armstead sought to have her marriage to Green annulled. They'd been wed in June 2009 after living together for a year or two, relatives of the woman said. On the annulment documents, Armstead checked two boxes to explain why the marriage should be dissolved: One or both of parties were "under duress, fraudulently induced or forced to marry," and "did not possess the mental capacity to enter into marriage." Green had moved out by the day of the killings, but, according to family members, he told Armstead that his parole officer was going to check on him at their home the day of the slayings. Green persuaded her to let him spend the day at their brick house in the 3800 block of Morning Springs Trail in Dallas. About 5:30 p.m., Armstead dropped off her sons, then 9 and 12, at church. Dallas police say it was after she returned home that Green killed her and the 6-year-old, Jazzmen Montgomery. Green then showered in the same tub where he'd killed the little girl, put on church clothes, and left to pick up his two stepsons at church. About 8 p.m., Green picked up the boys and brought them home. After telling the older boy to take a bath, he called the younger brother into the kitchen, according to investigators. Green grabbed the boy and began cutting on his neck with a knife. But it was the dull side of the blade. Green stabbed the boy in the abdomen, and the boy called for his older brother. Somehow, Beach said, the boys did what their mother could not and convinced Green not to kill them. "Gary, we love you," Beach quoted the boys as saying. "You don't need to kill us. We're too young to die." But Green did show them the bodies of their mother and sister before he left. "I killed you mom because I loved her to death," Beach said Green told the boys. Green said he killed their sister because she would tell what happened. In his brief opening remarks, Green's defense attorney, Paul Johnson, asked jurors not to make up their minds until they hear all the evidence. According to police documents, Green left the home in his wife's car and called his mother, who told him to turn himself in. He did so and confessed to the slayings in a videotaped statement, police said. Green was paroled in 2000 after spending 10 years in prison for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He also spent time in jail, accused of failing to pay child support. Armstead worked part-time for the Dallas Independent School District. Green was not the father of her three children.

Killer of woman, child in Oak Cliff gets death penalty





05 November 2010 10:18 AM



Moments after a Dallas County jury sentenced Gary Green to death for fatally stabbing his wife Lovetta Armstead and drowning her 6-year-old daughter, the woman's two sons spoke to him in stirring victim impact statements that moved even veteran courtroom bailiffs to tears.
"Hey, Gary," the youngest boy said cheerily as he peered out from the witness stand Friday at a stone-faced Green, who had also stabbed him in the stomach on that night in September 2009 after asking the boys - now 10 and 13 - why he should let them live.
"I loved you and thought you would never betray me like this. To me, you were my father, and I loved you like my own father. But I'm not going to let you take over my life. And I do hope that you suffer."
His older brother followed him to the stand and immediately issued a challenge to the man who killed his mother and sister Jazzmen.
"Gary Green, I want you to look me in the eye right here, right now and listen to what I have to say to you. You are nothing but a coward. You take other people's lives to make your own life better. I hope you feel pain like my mother and my sister. And I hope you die."
Green, 39, never looked at the boys as they spoke, or showed any emotion to the packed courtroom. He also didn't look a few minutes later when Dallas County prosecutors played a 33-second video of Jazzmen that caused audible sobbing throughout the courtroom. After the video, the girl's father, Ray Montgomery, addressed his daughter's killer.
"I hope you know how much you destroyed our lives, all because of your wrongdoing," Montgomery said. "You took my world when you took her life. All I wanted to hear from you was to say, 'I'm sorry,' or own up to what you did to my daughter. But you couldn't even do that."
Outside the courtroom, Montgomery said that the trial and having the chance to address Green had given him some closure. He noted that evidence in the trial showed others had been assaulted by Green in the past, including a woman he choked unconscious while she was pregnant with his child. He said the guilty verdict and death sentence were for them, too.
"I feel my daughter and her mother got justice served," said Montgomery, 30. "But not just justice for them, but for all the other victims that this man has hurt."
Testimony in the case showed that Green was upset because Armstead wanted to leave him. On Sept. 21, 2009, Green hogtied Jazzmen with duct tape and a telephone cord, then carried her into her mother's bedroom. There, Green used several knives - breaking two - to stab Armstead 28 times, all in front of her child.
Then he filled a bathtub with water and drowned the bound child. He went and picked up the boys from church and brought them home. He then made them hug and kiss the lifeless body of their mother.
Defense attorneys Paul Johnson, Kobby Warren and Brady Wyatt presented evidence showing that Green suffers from schizoaffective disorder, bipolar, which makes him wrongly believe that people are trying to hurt him.
"We tried to show the mental issues that we believed were an integral part of his life," Johnson said. "Obviously, the jury didn't agree with us. We're disappointed, but we don't quarrel with the verdict."
But prosecutors Andy Beach and Josh Healey said that it wasn't mental illness that drove Green to kill, but a selfish rage. And that rage, they said, is why he needed the death sentence.
"Gary Green is not a monster," Beach told jurors during Friday's closing arguments. "He's capable of monstrous conduct, but he's not a monster. He gets mad, he gets jealous, and then he gets violent. Wherever he is, Gary Green will always be a threat."

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/dallas/headlines/20101105-Killer-of-woman-child-in-2300.ece