Son accused in mother’s stabbing death
Suspect arrested on parole violation, then charged with murder
A Harris County man was charged in the fatal stabbing of his 79-year-old mother Tuesday, just hours after he was arrested on a parole violation after he skipped out on curfew last week.
Houston police picked up 56year-old Garry Jenkins on Tuesday morning, five days after he slipped out of the house after hours — a misstep that would have been detected by the ankle monitor that was a condition of his parole, according to Texas prison officials.
He was jailed Tuesday morning after Houston police picked him up on the parole violation.
Hours later, under questioning by sheriff ’s office investigators, he was charged with the murder of his mother, Vertie Hamilton.
A neighbor made the gruesome discovery Monday afternoon when he paid a visit to the woman’s Humble home after not hearing from her for two days, according to Harris County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Thomas Gilliland.
As he walked up to the house in the 7700 block of Audubon Forest, he found the slain woman lying just inside the front door, officials said.
It’s not clear how many times she was stabbed or where, but authorities said she was last seen with her son. Investigators flagged him as a person of interest and distributed his picture Monday evening in hopes of tracking down his whereabouts.
Authorities are still working to obtain security camera footage from inside the home, hoping to piece together what led up to the woman’s final moments.
Over the past 25 years, Jenkins had been arrested repeatedly in Harris County, court records show. In 1991, after one of his early arrests, he got 10 years in prison for auto theft. In the years that followed, he racked up charges for theft and trespassing before netting a 40-year sentence in 1997 for an aggravated robbery.
It was that crime for which he was still on parole at the time of the stabbing, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jeremy Desel. He’d just gotten out of prison in February.