MELBOURNE, Fla. — Catherine Jones is a free woman.
The security office at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala confirmed that Jones, 30, who spent more than 16 years behind bars for murder, left the prison this morning — less than a week after her 29-year-old brother was released.
Jones, and her younger brother Curtis, 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. Their cries fell on deaf ears even after investigators from what is now the state Department of Children and Families identified evidence of the abuse and other signs such as Catherine running away from home and the siblings acting out in school.
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.
At the time, the pair were the youngest to ever be charged with first-degree murder in the country and faced the prospect of life in prison. They never mentioned the abuse to their attorneys and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, accepting the sentence of 18 years and probation for life. Catherine Jones was 13; Curtis was 12.
The sexual abuse was revealed during an interview with Florida Today in 2009 and verified in confidential documents revealed to the newspaper by an attorney working to gain the children clemency several years ago.
Jones leaves prison a married woman. She married Navy Senior Chief Ramous K. Fleming in November 2013 after the two became pen pals.
"After spending all of my teenage years and most of my young adulthood behind bars, I'm being released into a foreign society so different from what I left behind," she wrote in a letter to Florida Today in 2014.
"Of course there are fears, mainly because there's so much I must learn to function like a normal person: how to drive, fill out job applications, text, dress for a job interview, build my credit, obtain life, dental, medical insurance. I'm completely clueless. The idea of being 30 and completely dependent on others to teach me how to do these basic things isn't appealing. I'll leave prison just as clueless as I was at 13."
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