Genelle Conway-Allen, a foster child who lived in Suisun City, would have turned 17 this week.
What should have been a time of celebration was instead a time of grave sorrow, anguish and lasting pain laced with hatred for the man who savagely murdered her in 2013 when she just a 13-year-old girl.
Conway-Allens family members gathered in a crowded courtroom Friday morning to watch the sentencing of the man who grabbed up their loved one as she walked home from Green Valley Middle School one afternoon in January 2013. Her nude body was discovered about 14 hours later on the morning of Feb. 1 at Allan Witt Park. She had been raped, sodomized, strangled, stripped, murdered and her body dumped in the predawn darkness.
Judge E. Bradley Nelson urged family members to try to remember Conway-Allen for who she was and not for what had happened to her. They tried to do that Friday.
Every time I drive on West Texas past that park, there is so much pain, an aunt told Nelson.
The outcome of Fridays sentencing for Anthony L. Jones, 35, was a foregone conclusion. He pleaded guilty in May to a murder charge with prosecutors agreeing to forego pursuing the death penalty in exchange for a punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
