YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2011
Ten months ago, my daughter Jeanne Marie Fisher, two days before her fifty-first birthday, crossing 66th Street in Pinellas Park, Florida was hit and killed by a hit-and-run driver.
Jeannie was a tall, blond pretty woman, a single parent, a waitress and one of four siblings, all of whom were high achievers but none of whom had her passion for life, predisposition to humor, quality of love, artistic temperament, sense of the absurd or unconditional tolerance for the shenanigans of other members of her family. She often said, “I have far less than any of you, but more of a capacity for happiness. Thank God I don’t have to worry about what I have or what I am, like you all do.”
Jeannie would often call her father up on the telephone, and he could tell as soon as she started to talk whether she had had a few drinks or not. She would say, “You’re my dad. Do you know that? You’re my dad.” It brings tears to my eyes now, but I must admit I would be impatient with her, and ask what she had on her mind. It was always the same. She didn’t want anything. She just wanted to connect with her father. She just wanted to bridge the void of her loneliness. Most of her adult life was spent alone having little tolerance for men, other than as disposable lovers and then not too frequently.
Her one crowning achievement was a son, Taylor Fisher, who carries her surname, a son who was the whole world to her, and a son, now nineteen, who never gave her a single moment of anxiety, a son, now in college, who had his mother taken from him when he most needed her.
Jeannie told me in one of her frequent telephone calls that Taylor wished that she would stop drinking and smoking because he wanted her to be around when he married and had children. She would make little confessions like this on the phone. There would be a void of silence when her father could hear the intake of breath, and the drag on the constant cigarette.
Part of her unconditional love was to accept her father, oddball that he was, who lived in his little cocoon who never drank, never smoked, and was always lecturing her about the irrevocable importance of the choices we make in life. “You should like yourself, Jeannie,” her father would say, “you should be important to yourself and not do things that harm you.”
She would reply always the same, “I’m working on it,” when he knew she never did. She never saw herself as others saw her, never was as kind to herself as she was to others, never appreciated herself like she appreciated others, especially her family.
Each Thanksgiving, she would look forward to having her picture taken with her father. It was one of the crowning moments of that annual festivity. She wasn’t here this Thanksgiving, and so her father had his picture taken with his arm out as if around her, knowing her spirit was in his midst.
When she was born, her eyes turned inward, and she had to have surgery to correct the fault. She had her first surgery, and then her father was very busy and seldom home, traveling over a good part of the world. She never had that second operation. Whether it would have restored her vision or not, it is a moot question. The point is that Jeannie never had good eyesight. Her vision became increasingly worse as she got older.
Eyesight is very important for a waitress, and she struggled with the problem so much so that she was constantly losing a job and seeking another over the years. What was singularly evident with her, however, was that she displayed a resilience that none of the rest of us have. We didn’t hear about “Woe is me,” as is typical of our Irish race, for she pressed on.
Little as she had, her apartment was a display of an artistic temperament. She could turn crates into colorful furnishings, common prints into beautiful montages, flower arrangements into botanical gardens, and second and third hand furniture into the appearance of regal splendor.
My wife Betty and I would visit her in her home in Pinellas County (Florida), and take her out to buy groceries and then to lunch, and you would think it was a grand vacation the way she treated us. That was another quality of Jeannie. We never knew how much she was hurting financially because she never asked for a penny.
The last time we went to see her for this little excursion, she said, “Let’s not go anywhere. Let’s just sit and talk,” and we did for nearly three hours.
Similarly, her big sister, Laurie, who was there for her since she was a little girl, always bonding with her whether Laurie was in Gainesville, Florida going to school at the University of Florida, going to school in Chicago at the University of Chicago, or modeling in some metropolitan area. Jeannie would be sure to find a reason to be with her. Two siblings couldn’t be closer. Taking Jeannie from her has put a kind of hurt on Laurie for which there is no cure, no satisfaction, and no relief. The pain never stops because there is nothing that can fill the void.
It is the same with her little brother, all six-foot three and 265 pounds of him. Michael has always lived in Pinellas County since he returned with his parents and siblings from South Africa as a little boy. Since he lived close by, he could get a call at any time, day or night, when she had a need for him. She might have fallen down the stairs, needed to have some furniture picked up, needed a ride to somewhere for a job interview, or a myriad of other little needs, and she would not hesitate to contact him, and he would be there for her.
She would ride from Pinellas County to Hillsborough County and Tampa, a distance of some fifty miles, for family get-to-gathers with Michael, his wife, Chrissy, and their twin boys, Killian and Keaton.
Michael and Jeannie are natural comedians being able to see the absurd in the most everything. They would entertain each other on these sorties back and forth between counties with slapstick high jinx entertainment. She would run her hand through Michael’s hair that is still long and blond like a legendary Celt, and tell him how handsome he was. She has left a void with him as well that cannot be filled, a void that he keeps more to himself than does his sister, Laurie, but a void nonetheless that causes him great and constant pain.
There is another brother, Robert, who lives in Philadelphia. Robert is the big brother. He is the brother who has constantly reinvented himself like his father has, and has made a good living hitting a tennis ball. He has fared better than those once on the tour as the tennis pro of an exclusive tennis club.
Robert is close to a member of the so-called “one percent” that the Occupy Wall Street moment so detests. He lost his silver spoon when his father retired in his thirties and no longer made the big salary that would have supported a tennis player on the tour. He was that good, and knew it, and held certain resentment for his father for denying him that dream. Despite that, through hard work, discipline, and persistence, he has been a constant value added component to his successful tennis club.
Robert was there for Jeannie in her early adult years when she would go off the wagon and the on the rails somewhere, and need help, immediately. He would be there for her no questions asked. As his career soared, and the distance between Jeannie and him grew, it was not possible to be there for her in the same manner. At her funeral, he confessed that he had let her down, which was not true. He simply handed off the model of attention that he had displayed so well to his other siblings, and they did not let Jeannie or him down.
Robert is very much like his father, remote, a loner, and a demander of himself far in excess of what is reasonable, and therefore a person who is as deep a feeler as it is possible to be, which is another way of saying in constant torment. As much as the loss is to his other siblings, the loss to him is a mortality slap in the face that sends shutters through him as it does his father.
As I write these words, I think of the number of times Jeannie has thanked me and thanked her mother for bringing her into the world. “I have this dream, daddy,” she would say, “that I am in Limbo, and I want desperately to be born, and somehow I can’t seem to escape my confinement, and then finally I am in the world. I am born. I am alive. I am your daughter.”
Who knows what goes on with a child in the womb? Who knows what life is about before birth or after death? Who knows if a dream is a dream or if what we are now experiencing is a dream, and the reality we so cling to doesn’t actually exist?
Jeannie’s mother went to the hospital three times in false labor. She was a breached baby, and suffered as I’ve expressed here the malady of her eyes. No person ever had more beautiful eyes than Jeannie, sky blue and warm as a summer sky.
Heather Mayo, a 32-year-old woman with a history of drug abuse, driving without a license and without auto insurance in a neighbor’s truck, saw Jeannie Marie Fisher on the island on Pinellas Park Boulevard, hoping that she would not step off the island, going too fast to stop, knowing she was going to hit her, shutting her eyes and hitting her at full throttle, knocking her into the air, and then running over her again.
It was at this point Heather Mayo made a series of poor choices.
She made a U-turn, and stopped in a parking lot across the street, thinking everyone had seen what she had done as they rushed to see Jeannie sprawled out in the street. When none questioned her involvement, she drove away.
She had come to Pinellas Park to buy six ounces of marijuana for her boyfriend in Palm Harbor, some thirty miles north of Pinellas Park. He saw the blood and damage to the truck, and asked her what happened, and she said she had hit a deer.
Subsequently, it is my understanding that she and her boyfriend watched Laurie and Michael on television pleading on February 5, 2011, the day after Jeannie’s death, for whomever did this to turn him or herself in. Heather Mayo didn’t. That was ten months ago.
As life often imitates fiction, the Pinellas Park Police Department kept the case file open, kept Laurie and Michael informed, and eventually solved the case by what would appear serendipity, but which actually amounted to astute police work. I know good police work, as I was a police consultant across the nation during the 1970s and worked closely with scores of police departments.
Just days ago, Heather Mayo was having trouble with her boyfriend, and dialed 911 with the police coming to investigate the domestic disturbance. As the boyfriend was arrested, she hollered at him, “I’m thinking of filing a restraining order against you.”
He yelled back, “Well, I’m telling the police you hit and killed that girl in February.”
It was 3 a.m. in the morning, and the police officer, used to these kinds of accusatory exchanges in the heat of the moment, could have filed it under, "more of the same," but he didn’t. He looked up on his computer and found there was a cold case for a hit-and-run death in Pinellas Park in February 2011 of Jeannie Marie Fisher. He asked for backup, and stayed at the home until other officers arrived, and worked out what was what, arresting Heather Mayo, as well as her boyfriend, and working out the details until after 5 a.m.
Apparently, in one of their marijuana induced sessions, Heather Mayo had confessed to her boyfriend that she was the one who had hit and killed that girl in February. He held that against her, and used it as blackmail to have her get him drugs until that fateful confrontation mentioned here.
Remarkably, the truck that was damaged in February had never been repaired with the pieces of the truck left at the scene of the hit-and-run matching perfectly with the vehicle.
Heather Mayo has made a two-hour written confession of the crime, along with a video confession as well. She says she is remorseful for what she has done, and obviously would like to put this behind her and go on with her life, hoping to get her seven-year-old daughter back who has been taken from her.
Were this all a dream, and were it possible for Jeannie Marie Fisher to reappear out of the midst, and were all the hurt over the past ten months able to miraculously disappear, and were it possible to erase the bad choices made by Heather Mayo, not only at the time of this tragedy, but over her past thirty-two-years, I would be the first to forgive and forget. Unfortunately, it is not possible.
We are all sinners, and we all must pay for our sins. There are no winners and losers in this affair, only damaged people. Being remorseful runs shallow because it was not arrived at voluntarily or timely when it would have demonstrated remorse. I am not accepting of the remorse in any measure or in any way. Heather Mayo was found out and now she must suffer for her crime. Whatever that punishment is, it will not bring back Jeannie Marie Fisher, or ease the pain of her loved ones. That will continue as long as they are alive. That is their life sentence. What should Heather Mayo’s be?
As I’ve said, I’ve been around law enforcement in one of my former careers, and have been a professor of many who have had or are having careers in the various functions of law enforcement from serving and protecting to criminal justice to incarceration. What is most sad to report from that exposure and experience is that few learn from their mistakes. To put it another way, they seldom make better choices once they serve their time, find new friends, and seek new surroundings and careers. Recidivism is so shockingly high that our incarcerating institutions are always overcrowded. Chances are whatever Heather Mayo’s sentence, she will come out an equally damaged or more damaged person than when she went into the correction facility, more a dreg on society than she already is.
So, what should Heather Mayo’s punishment be? Ideally, it should be a place where she would likely be able to learn a trade, become drug free, learn to make better choices, and to grow up. Society’s interest should be to save her from the damaged heap of her kind that people a good part of society, a part that it is easier to look the other way than to deal with the problem. I am for anything approaching that possibility. This is not because I am lenient; anyone who knows me knows that is not part of my DNA. It is because I want to believe that she can be saved because in saving her we save something of Jeannie Marie Fisher, which is worth saving.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2011
Ten months ago, my daughter Jeanne Marie Fisher, two days before her fifty-first birthday, crossing 66th Street in Pinellas Park, Florida was hit and killed by a hit-and-run driver.
Jeannie was a tall, blond pretty woman, a single parent, a waitress and one of four siblings, all of whom were high achievers but none of whom had her passion for life, predisposition to humor, quality of love, artistic temperament, sense of the absurd or unconditional tolerance for the shenanigans of other members of her family. She often said, “I have far less than any of you, but more of a capacity for happiness. Thank God I don’t have to worry about what I have or what I am, like you all do.”
Jeannie would often call her father up on the telephone, and he could tell as soon as she started to talk whether she had had a few drinks or not. She would say, “You’re my dad. Do you know that? You’re my dad.” It brings tears to my eyes now, but I must admit I would be impatient with her, and ask what she had on her mind. It was always the same. She didn’t want anything. She just wanted to connect with her father. She just wanted to bridge the void of her loneliness. Most of her adult life was spent alone having little tolerance for men, other than as disposable lovers and then not too frequently.
Her one crowning achievement was a son, Taylor Fisher, who carries her surname, a son who was the whole world to her, and a son, now nineteen, who never gave her a single moment of anxiety, a son, now in college, who had his mother taken from him when he most needed her.
Jeannie told me in one of her frequent telephone calls that Taylor wished that she would stop drinking and smoking because he wanted her to be around when he married and had children. She would make little confessions like this on the phone. There would be a void of silence when her father could hear the intake of breath, and the drag on the constant cigarette.
Part of her unconditional love was to accept her father, oddball that he was, who lived in his little cocoon who never drank, never smoked, and was always lecturing her about the irrevocable importance of the choices we make in life. “You should like yourself, Jeannie,” her father would say, “you should be important to yourself and not do things that harm you.”
She would reply always the same, “I’m working on it,” when he knew she never did. She never saw herself as others saw her, never was as kind to herself as she was to others, never appreciated herself like she appreciated others, especially her family.
Each Thanksgiving, she would look forward to having her picture taken with her father. It was one of the crowning moments of that annual festivity. She wasn’t here this Thanksgiving, and so her father had his picture taken with his arm out as if around her, knowing her spirit was in his midst.
When she was born, her eyes turned inward, and she had to have surgery to correct the fault. She had her first surgery, and then her father was very busy and seldom home, traveling over a good part of the world. She never had that second operation. Whether it would have restored her vision or not, it is a moot question. The point is that Jeannie never had good eyesight. Her vision became increasingly worse as she got older.
Eyesight is very important for a waitress, and she struggled with the problem so much so that she was constantly losing a job and seeking another over the years. What was singularly evident with her, however, was that she displayed a resilience that none of the rest of us have. We didn’t hear about “Woe is me,” as is typical of our Irish race, for she pressed on.
Little as she had, her apartment was a display of an artistic temperament. She could turn crates into colorful furnishings, common prints into beautiful montages, flower arrangements into botanical gardens, and second and third hand furniture into the appearance of regal splendor.
My wife Betty and I would visit her in her home in Pinellas County (Florida), and take her out to buy groceries and then to lunch, and you would think it was a grand vacation the way she treated us. That was another quality of Jeannie. We never knew how much she was hurting financially because she never asked for a penny.
The last time we went to see her for this little excursion, she said, “Let’s not go anywhere. Let’s just sit and talk,” and we did for nearly three hours.
Similarly, her big sister, Laurie, who was there for her since she was a little girl, always bonding with her whether Laurie was in Gainesville, Florida going to school at the University of Florida, going to school in Chicago at the University of Chicago, or modeling in some metropolitan area. Jeannie would be sure to find a reason to be with her. Two siblings couldn’t be closer. Taking Jeannie from her has put a kind of hurt on Laurie for which there is no cure, no satisfaction, and no relief. The pain never stops because there is nothing that can fill the void.
It is the same with her little brother, all six-foot three and 265 pounds of him. Michael has always lived in Pinellas County since he returned with his parents and siblings from South Africa as a little boy. Since he lived close by, he could get a call at any time, day or night, when she had a need for him. She might have fallen down the stairs, needed to have some furniture picked up, needed a ride to somewhere for a job interview, or a myriad of other little needs, and she would not hesitate to contact him, and he would be there for her.
She would ride from Pinellas County to Hillsborough County and Tampa, a distance of some fifty miles, for family get-to-gathers with Michael, his wife, Chrissy, and their twin boys, Killian and Keaton.
Michael and Jeannie are natural comedians being able to see the absurd in the most everything. They would entertain each other on these sorties back and forth between counties with slapstick high jinx entertainment. She would run her hand through Michael’s hair that is still long and blond like a legendary Celt, and tell him how handsome he was. She has left a void with him as well that cannot be filled, a void that he keeps more to himself than does his sister, Laurie, but a void nonetheless that causes him great and constant pain.
There is another brother, Robert, who lives in Philadelphia. Robert is the big brother. He is the brother who has constantly reinvented himself like his father has, and has made a good living hitting a tennis ball. He has fared better than those once on the tour as the tennis pro of an exclusive tennis club.
Robert is close to a member of the so-called “one percent” that the Occupy Wall Street moment so detests. He lost his silver spoon when his father retired in his thirties and no longer made the big salary that would have supported a tennis player on the tour. He was that good, and knew it, and held certain resentment for his father for denying him that dream. Despite that, through hard work, discipline, and persistence, he has been a constant value added component to his successful tennis club.
Robert was there for Jeannie in her early adult years when she would go off the wagon and the on the rails somewhere, and need help, immediately. He would be there for her no questions asked. As his career soared, and the distance between Jeannie and him grew, it was not possible to be there for her in the same manner. At her funeral, he confessed that he had let her down, which was not true. He simply handed off the model of attention that he had displayed so well to his other siblings, and they did not let Jeannie or him down.
Robert is very much like his father, remote, a loner, and a demander of himself far in excess of what is reasonable, and therefore a person who is as deep a feeler as it is possible to be, which is another way of saying in constant torment. As much as the loss is to his other siblings, the loss to him is a mortality slap in the face that sends shutters through him as it does his father.
As I write these words, I think of the number of times Jeannie has thanked me and thanked her mother for bringing her into the world. “I have this dream, daddy,” she would say, “that I am in Limbo, and I want desperately to be born, and somehow I can’t seem to escape my confinement, and then finally I am in the world. I am born. I am alive. I am your daughter.”
Who knows what goes on with a child in the womb? Who knows what life is about before birth or after death? Who knows if a dream is a dream or if what we are now experiencing is a dream, and the reality we so cling to doesn’t actually exist?
Jeannie’s mother went to the hospital three times in false labor. She was a breached baby, and suffered as I’ve expressed here the malady of her eyes. No person ever had more beautiful eyes than Jeannie, sky blue and warm as a summer sky.
Heather Mayo, a 32-year-old woman with a history of drug abuse, driving without a license and without auto insurance in a neighbor’s truck, saw Jeannie Marie Fisher on the island on Pinellas Park Boulevard, hoping that she would not step off the island, going too fast to stop, knowing she was going to hit her, shutting her eyes and hitting her at full throttle, knocking her into the air, and then running over her again.
It was at this point Heather Mayo made a series of poor choices.
She made a U-turn, and stopped in a parking lot across the street, thinking everyone had seen what she had done as they rushed to see Jeannie sprawled out in the street. When none questioned her involvement, she drove away.
She had come to Pinellas Park to buy six ounces of marijuana for her boyfriend in Palm Harbor, some thirty miles north of Pinellas Park. He saw the blood and damage to the truck, and asked her what happened, and she said she had hit a deer.
Subsequently, it is my understanding that she and her boyfriend watched Laurie and Michael on television pleading on February 5, 2011, the day after Jeannie’s death, for whomever did this to turn him or herself in. Heather Mayo didn’t. That was ten months ago.
As life often imitates fiction, the Pinellas Park Police Department kept the case file open, kept Laurie and Michael informed, and eventually solved the case by what would appear serendipity, but which actually amounted to astute police work. I know good police work, as I was a police consultant across the nation during the 1970s and worked closely with scores of police departments.
Just days ago, Heather Mayo was having trouble with her boyfriend, and dialed 911 with the police coming to investigate the domestic disturbance. As the boyfriend was arrested, she hollered at him, “I’m thinking of filing a restraining order against you.”
He yelled back, “Well, I’m telling the police you hit and killed that girl in February.”
It was 3 a.m. in the morning, and the police officer, used to these kinds of accusatory exchanges in the heat of the moment, could have filed it under, "more of the same," but he didn’t. He looked up on his computer and found there was a cold case for a hit-and-run death in Pinellas Park in February 2011 of Jeannie Marie Fisher. He asked for backup, and stayed at the home until other officers arrived, and worked out what was what, arresting Heather Mayo, as well as her boyfriend, and working out the details until after 5 a.m.
Apparently, in one of their marijuana induced sessions, Heather Mayo had confessed to her boyfriend that she was the one who had hit and killed that girl in February. He held that against her, and used it as blackmail to have her get him drugs until that fateful confrontation mentioned here.
Remarkably, the truck that was damaged in February had never been repaired with the pieces of the truck left at the scene of the hit-and-run matching perfectly with the vehicle.
Heather Mayo has made a two-hour written confession of the crime, along with a video confession as well. She says she is remorseful for what she has done, and obviously would like to put this behind her and go on with her life, hoping to get her seven-year-old daughter back who has been taken from her.
Were this all a dream, and were it possible for Jeannie Marie Fisher to reappear out of the midst, and were all the hurt over the past ten months able to miraculously disappear, and were it possible to erase the bad choices made by Heather Mayo, not only at the time of this tragedy, but over her past thirty-two-years, I would be the first to forgive and forget. Unfortunately, it is not possible.
We are all sinners, and we all must pay for our sins. There are no winners and losers in this affair, only damaged people. Being remorseful runs shallow because it was not arrived at voluntarily or timely when it would have demonstrated remorse. I am not accepting of the remorse in any measure or in any way. Heather Mayo was found out and now she must suffer for her crime. Whatever that punishment is, it will not bring back Jeannie Marie Fisher, or ease the pain of her loved ones. That will continue as long as they are alive. That is their life sentence. What should Heather Mayo’s be?
As I’ve said, I’ve been around law enforcement in one of my former careers, and have been a professor of many who have had or are having careers in the various functions of law enforcement from serving and protecting to criminal justice to incarceration. What is most sad to report from that exposure and experience is that few learn from their mistakes. To put it another way, they seldom make better choices once they serve their time, find new friends, and seek new surroundings and careers. Recidivism is so shockingly high that our incarcerating institutions are always overcrowded. Chances are whatever Heather Mayo’s sentence, she will come out an equally damaged or more damaged person than when she went into the correction facility, more a dreg on society than she already is.
So, what should Heather Mayo’s punishment be? Ideally, it should be a place where she would likely be able to learn a trade, become drug free, learn to make better choices, and to grow up. Society’s interest should be to save her from the damaged heap of her kind that people a good part of society, a part that it is easier to look the other way than to deal with the problem. I am for anything approaching that possibility. This is not because I am lenient; anyone who knows me knows that is not part of my DNA. It is because I want to believe that she can be saved because in saving her we save something of Jeannie Marie Fisher, which is worth saving.
* * *