A BLESSED LIFE OF FORGIVENESS
Compassion for grandson’s killer, 12, & kin
CONNOR Verkerke was the kind of kid everybody loved.
The adorable blondhaired, blue-eyed 9-year-old with freckles on his nose played doting big brother to three younger siblings, liked to make people laugh by reciting “Captain Underpants” books and couldn’t get enough of the Dalai Lama.
And no one adored Connor more than his nana, Toni Nunemaker.
When the Michigan boy was old enough to go to school, Nunemaker, a music teacher, enrolled him where she worked. She picked him up and drove him with her every day, and he would eat his breakfast in her room before class.
Then the unthinkable happened. Jamarion Lawhorn, a deeply troubled 12-year-old from Grand Rapids, randomly walked into Connor’s neighborhood on Aug. 4, 2014, with a knife hidden in his hoodie and fatally stabbed the child in a playground. Jamarion was never able to say exactly why he committed the heinous crime.
Nunemaker’s community was outraged. But the grandmother, 63, turned her own anger and despair into something remarkable.
She not only forgave her grandson’s murderer, she has since taken his troubled mother, Anita Lawhorn, under her wing, regularly giving her money for groceries and driving her on errands, including even to visit Jamarion behind bars.
“I can’t change the past, but I have the ability to choose my response,” Nunemaker recently told The Post during an interview from her Grand Rapids classroom.
“We need more compassion in this world so that we can become all we are meant to be,’’ Nunemaker said. “Really, who needs more hate?”
NUNEMAKER said she felt pity for Jamarion from his first day on the witness stand.
His “voice sounded flat and devoid of emotion” as he rattled off how he stabbed Connor as he played on a slide, she said.
At trial, Jamarion had testified how he first buried his knife in the dirt at the local playground and then randomly lured Connor, his younger brother and a friend from their yard.
Jamarion described how he was soon stabbing Connor four times in the back. The dying child stumbled back home with the help of his horrified younger brother and friend. Connor died on his front porch. Jamarion called 911 after the killing to confess, and the tapes were played at his trial.
“I just stabbed someone,” Jamarion told the operator. “I’m fed up with life and want to die.
“Come get me and lock me up for life. Take me to juvenile for life. Kill me.”
Just hours after the killing, Nunemaker said, one of the only things she wanted to do was meet the mother of her grandson’s killer.
Nunemaker said she heard from neighbors that Anita Lawhorn had visited the scene of the crime, crying.
“She was walking around, saying, ‘I want to find the family of the boy who was killed, I want to say I’m sorry,’ ” Nunemaker said.
A few days later, Nunemaker heard Anita had lost her job at a local food-processing plant because her co-workers thought she was a monster.
“I knew she was sorry,” Nunemaker said. “She had lost someone, too.”
Nunemaker and her son, Jared, Connor’s father, decided to track down Anita. They found her outside the home she shared with some of her kids and her boyfriend, Bernard Harrold.
“We stood outside and talked and cried. She was mortified, she was so sorry,” the teacher recalled. “We gave her $150 for food and thought, ‘Should we do this every week?’ ”
Nunemaker said that when some members of the community heard about her kindness toward Anita, they became angry.
The grandma addressed her critics during Connor’s memorial service 10 days after his death.
“After Connor was killed, we said, ‘Close the village gates, bring the children inside, bring out the weapons to protect our children and ourselves,’ ” she said.
“But maybe the answer is to open the village gates.”
At the time, Nunemaker had no clue about Anita’s abusive past.
While Jamarion was awaiting trial, it surfaced that Anita, a former Geneva, NY, resident, had already given up custody of two daughters after child welfare opened a report on her. According to the 1996 report, her then-1year-old daughter was found with multiple broken bones and the 3year-old had cigarette burns on her chest.
Jamarion had also been abused, investigators said. Officials said he came from a “deplorable” home with no sheets or blankets on the beds and no utilities, with drug paraphernalia scattered in the bathroom. Harrold admitted to beating Jamarion with a belt, which left permanent scars on his back.
While Jamarion was convicted of murder, Lawhorn and Harrold received a year in prison for abusing him.
“When I found out about her, and that she was a drug addict, I thought, ‘ Why am I helping? Did she do drugs with the money we gave her for groceries?’ But I didn’t allow myself to dwell on that.
“No matter what she did, I knew I needed to see her through eyes of compassion and love. Why does our human nature allow us to decide that only some people are worthy of love and compassion?” she said.
Since Anita was released from prison, Nunemaker has continued to give her money for food and act as chauffeur, particularly when the mom wants to visit Jamarion in his detention facility.
“She has a felony, she can’t get a job,” Nunemaker said of Anita. “She’s living in a motel and trying to raise her other kids. It’s not right.” T HERE are two things Nunemaker says she has always loved: music and children.
Since graduating from teaching college in the 1970s, she has taught nearly 7,000 children from kindergarten through eight grade in her music and band classes at Excel Charter Academy in Grand Rapids.
Nunemaker said she was thrilled when Connor joined her at the school. The pair formed an incredibly special bond traveling back and forth together and hanging out before and after classes.
The grandmother said Connor was clearly more emotionally mature than others in his grade and liked to talk of spirituality.
Two months before he was killed, he was promoted from third grade and asked his grandmother to help him with his summer reading assignment — passages written by the 14th Dalai Lama.
“I’ve never known a 9-year-old who wanted to read about the Dalai Lama for his summer study,” the proud grandma said.
While writing his book report, Connor remarked about the spiritual leader’s advice on how to live in a constant state of love, she said.
“What if we lived this way all the time?” she said Connor asked her.
Her grandson — who she said started every conversation with her by saying, “Hey, Nana!” — then urged her to write her own book.
“You have so many stories of love, Nana,” he told her.
Nunemaker said that after Connor died, she decided to honor him by taking his suggestion.
“I wrote ‘Hey Nana!’ in two weeks,” she said, referring to her self-published, 102-page book, which went online last month.
Nunemaker, who still teaches seven classes a day, said the book explains how forgiveness helped her heal.
“I have learned when I live in fear, I am not living my best life,” she writes.
“I realized I was grieving for myself ” and that Connor “was doing just fine with God.”
In the book, she asks that people forgive Jamarion, who was placed at the Muskegon River Youth Home. Whether he is released in two years, at the age of 18, or transferred to an adult prison remains to be determined.
She also asks that people forgive Anita and understand why Nunemaker is compelled to help her.
“Curiously, I’m often struck by the contrast in how people are treated,” the grandmother writes.
“After Connor’s death, my family and I were so blessed by an outpouring of love and generosity.
“But what about Jamarion and his family? Who held them in their hearts and prayers?” A NITA Lawhorn has a Facebook page, where photos of her and her children — including Jamarion — are on display.
Her last post — a shared photo of a woman in prayer with the caption, “I am praying for the person reading this” — was Aug. 4, 2015, the first anniversary of Connor’s killing.
Anita, now 40, didn’t return calls seeking comment.
But Nunemaker reports that the mom is doing fine and has since reunited with her two daughters from New York.
Nunemaker said Anita knows about her book and agrees with the message.
“My goal is to move forward,” Nunemaker said.
“Compassion is really underrated these days.” lmassarella@nypost.com