Photos by Cornell Watson
When Patrice “Monique” Jennings thinks about her mother, she thinks about how the two of them used to sit in their Murfreesboro, North Carolina, home and devour Lifetime movies.
It was the early 1990s, when the network’s made-for-television dramas were a fixture for many around the country, and Mary “Evon” Jennings Fleetwood adored them. When it was just the two of them, they’d settle in together, swaddled in the warm glow of whatever flick was playing.
Monique remembers her mother as quiet and petite, as well as fiercely devoted to her four children. When Monique made the cheerleading squad in the seventh grade, her mother was ecstatic, paying to have pictures taken.
She never got to see them.
On Nov. 5, 1993, when Monique was 12 years old, she and her younger brother, 11-year-old Jermaine, came home to find Evon lying beneath a blanket on the couch, burned and refusing to allow her children to see her injuries. She initially said that she had accidentally caught fire while refilling a kerosene heater. But after investigators told her that her boyfriend, Stacey “Sabur” Tyler, couldn’t hurt her, witnesses testified that Evon had identified him as the person who attacked her by setting her ablaze.
Evon died in the hospital days later. Tyler was eventually found guilty of murdering her and sentenced to death. He has spent decades awaiting execution. A moratorium on the death penalty has been in place in North Carolina since 2006, though a law Gov. Josh Stein signed in October 2025 could revive the practice.
But more than three decades on, Monique, 45, says that she’s being pulled back into the worst days of her life. Tyler is the focus of a campaign maintaining that Evon’s death was accidental and that he was wrongfully convicted. A Georgetown University-based program created a short film questioning Tyler’s guilt, with Kim Kardashian promoting it on social media.
To Monique and her brothers — Darius, 48, and Jermaine, 44 — the effort hasn’t just reopened an old wound. They say that it has also pushed the woman they loved out of the story almost completely. Their other sibling, Anthony, died in 2016.
“I want my mama’s side to be told,” Monique told Capital B, through tears. “Because even though she couldn’t say much, she had a side. Her voice did matter.”
Inside Tyler’s trial
At Tyler’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence of what had happened to Evon in the hours before she was burned.
Witnesses James Shearn and Ernest Beale Jr. testified that on Nov. 5, 1993, they saw Tyler beating Evon “repeatedly with his fist” and threatening to kill her. Monique and Jermaine testified that their mother’s boyfriend had previously vowed to burn her and her children.
Later that day, Evon was found severely burned inside her trailer. Tyler told investigators that Evon had accidentally caught fire while refilling a kerosene heater. Investigators testified that they found no evidence that the heater had exploded or that a fire had started near it. They also testified that, behind Evon’s trailer, they found a book of matches and a gasoline container with an unscrewed cap.
At first, Evon indicated that Tyler hadn’t burned her. But witnesses, including a nurse, testified that she was told by investigators that Tyler was in police custody. Unable to speak, Evon answered their questions by nodding her head. She indicated that Tyler was the culprit.
Tyler didn’t testify during the guilt phase of his trial. At sentencing, he denied attacking Evon or setting her on fire, saying that he had attempted to put out the flames. Even so, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death in November 1995.
Two years later, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld his conviction and sentence.
A story they thought was settled
For a moment, Monique couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
It was June of this year, and on Instagram was Kim Kardashian sharing a story about a man whom Monique had known for years as her mother’s killer. However, the version of events that Kardashian was telling was dramatically different from the one Monique knew. On social media, Tyler was being portrayed as a man who had spent decades on death row “for something he didn’t do.”
Kardashian hasn’t responded to Capital B’s request for comment.
That post introduced Monique to an effort she says she was unaware of. Tyler is the subject of the film released by the Georgetown University-affiliated Making an Exoneree program, under the Prisons and Justice Initiative. The program’s student researchers examine potential wrongful convictions and advocate for people they believe are innocent. Since the program began in 2018, its work has contributed to the exoneration or release of 10 people. The researchers argue that Evon’s death happened as Tyler said, that it was an accident.
To Evon’s children, the campaign is challenging something they thought was settled. Now, suddenly, they’re revisiting a tragedy they never expected would be up for debate again.
Monique doesn’t dismiss the need for such work. As a Black woman, she explained, she’s keenly aware that Black Americans are disproportionately punished by the criminal legal system and that innocent people have been locked behind bars.
“I’d rather see a guilty man walk than an innocent man incarcerated,” she said. But she then added that, in Tyler’s case, she believes that the jury got it right: “This man isn’t innocent. He’s guilty.”
She also pointed to how women sometimes act when they’re in danger. Defending an abusive partner can appear exculpatory, she said, when that behavior might instead be an attempt by women to keep themselves or their families safe.
Her brothers feel just as certain about Tyler’s guilt. Darius remembers arriving at the family’s home after his grandmother received a call that something had happened to Evon.
“We went over there. She was burnt up pretty bad,” he told Capital B.
He recalls the heat inside the home, and seeing his mother badly burned. The kerosene heater was still burning when they arrived. This is a detail that he said has stuck with him as Tyler’s supporters have revived the argument that the heater caused the fire.
“I figure they know he did it,” Darius argued, referring to Tyler’s supporters. “They know he did it.”
In the film, Tyler denies that he had poured gasoline on Evon and set her on fire. The Georgetown program argues that the evidence used to convict him was unreliable and that scientific evidence bolsters his account of an accidental fire. The program is advocating for Tyler’s exoneration.
Tyler’s lawyer, Iqra Razzaq, says in the film that Evon denied “a couple times” that Tyler had purposely lit her on fire and that this was when she “was not under any sedatives.”
Razzaq hasn’t responded to Capital B’s request for comment.
Jermaine said that he could understand Tyler asking to be spared from execution — even seeking forgiveness for killing Evon. What he struggles to accept is a campaign that, as he sees it, is asking the family to believe that there’s nothing to forgive at all.
“[Tyler] don’t want forgiveness,” Jermaine told Capital B. “He wants it to be forgotten. No, man, that’s my mama.”
Evon’s death illustrates the complexity of Black Americans’ views of the death penalty. Studies show that Black Americans, who are disproportionately represented on death row, are the group most likely to oppose capital punishment.
The family is also frustrated about how they learned about the campaign. Monique said that no one involved with the film contacted her beforehand or warned her that her mother’s death would be presented to a new audience.
In a statement, Making an Exoneree explained that its films “reflect our assessment of the evidence — not a lack of compassion for victims or their families.” Generally, the program doesn’t contact victims or their families during investigations or advocacy out of respect for their trauma and pain. It acknowledged that wrongful-conviction cases can involve “overlapping and enduring harms” but added that it remains committed to advocating for people it believes were wrongfully convicted.
“When she came around, it was like joy”
Darius spent much of his childhood at his grandmother’s house. When Evon would arrive, he recalls the feeling she would bring with her.
“She was a lovable person,” he said. “Fun to be around.” He then put it more simply: “When she came around, it was like joy.”
That’s the Evon her children want people to know. She wasn’t just the woman whose burns were described in court or whose final moments became evidence in a murder trial. She was a mother who played softball, devoted weekends to her family, and, according to Monique, didn’t eat sweets but loved Oreos.
Whatever happens to Tyler, Evon’s children say that they don’t want his newfound prominence to erase the memory of her.
Jermaine thinks back fondly to a mother who built her life around taking care of her children. “She was a wonderful mom,” he said. “She was always working hard for her four kids.” There were other family members around to help, but when Jermaine reflects on his childhood, he remembers Evon as the anchor.
For Monique, preserving these memories is complicated by how difficult it was to grapple with the trauma that came with her mother’s death. After Evon died, her father took her to therapy. She went only once. Being asked to talk about a tragedy she wanted to forget left her feeling unmoored, she said, and she refused to go back.
“It’s a chapter that I wanted to close and just never have to think about again,” she said.
And she managed to do that — at least for a time. Now, she says that the attention around Tyler has brought that trauma back full force and has made her feel like the frightened 12-year-old she was when her mother died. She says that she’s struggled to eat and sleep, and she’s even had to miss work; she’s cried more in the past few months than she has in decades.
But while Monique wants to leave behind the pain, she refuses to give up the story of the mother she lost. Tyler has advocates making the case for him. Evon’s children say that she isn’t here to make a case for herself. That job has fallen to them.
“She’s not here to fight for herself,” Monique said. “So I have to.”
