Long before , Dexter Lewis knew death. He had felt it.
And long before that night, he knew what could be done by a knife in an angry hand. He had seen it.
Jurors who must decide whether Lewis lives or dies presenting mitigating circumstances that could outweigh his crime. On Wednesday, they heard from Lewis’ mother, Tammesa Jones. They heard how she punched her stomach and drank heavily while she was pregnant. They heard how she beat him and screamed profanities at him.
They also saw photos of a 3-year-old Lewis, standing beside his father’s open coffin. Then came photos of Lewis just a few weeks later, posing next to his stillborn brother Michael, who was dressed in clothes from Toys R Us.
And they heard about how a young Lewis was there for two stabbings involving Jones.
The day’s testimony began with Jones recounting her abusive relationship with Lewis’ father and the violence and death that surrounded young Lewis.
Jones moved in with Dexter Lewis Sr. and his family when she was only 15. She became pregnant when she was 16. And her relationship with Lewis Sr. — “good in the beginning,” she said — turned violent.
“He would choke me. He would kick me. One time he threw a whole music console onto me. And that was, like, seven months into my pregnancy,” Jones said, fighting back tears.
Defense attorney Christopher Baumann asked how she responded to the attacks. Jones began to sob.
“I would get back at him by punching my stomach really hard,” she said through sobs. “I would just hit my stomach over and over just because I was so mad and so angry.”
Lewis Sr. knew they were having a boy, and Jones, knowing his excitement about it, saw attacking her unborn son as the best method of fighting back, she said.
The beatings grew worse after Lewis was born. Once, Lewis Sr. got angry with the way she was cutting tomatoes and stabbed her in the arm.
Her son, then about 10 months old, was there.
“He crawled to me and was just grabbing my leg,” she said. “He was covered in blood, just holding on to my leg.”
On Jan. 22, 1994, shortly before Lewis turned 4, Lewis Sr. was shot and killed.
The jury saw pictures of a young Lewis, his hair in ponytails like his dad’s, reaching into the man’s coffin, touching the body.
“He’s trying to wake him up. That’s how they would play, and he would touch his eyes, it was like a peek-a-boo kind of thing,” Jones said. “And that’s what he’s doing — trying to wake him up.”
But the young Lewis realized his father was not going to wake up.
“He just laid there crying,” Jones said, as a picture was displayed of Lewis alone beside the coffin.
Jones was about 6 months pregnant at the time of Lewis Sr.’s death, and she suffered a miscarriage about two weeks later. Lewis had been looking forward to having a brother, Jones said.
Photographs of Lewis posing with the stillborn child were displayed.
“When he was looking and playing with the baby, he just had that look on his face,” she said. “Like it was happening all over again.”
Within a year after Lewis Sr.’s death, Jones and her son moved in with a man named Phillip Nash, with whom she was romantically involved.
“It was like living with the actual devil,” she said, describing how Nash beat and raped her.
Lewis would try to help his mother, hitting Nash on the back. On one such occasion, when Lewis was 8, Nash turned and hit him. Jones said she ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife and — in front of Lewis — began to stab Nash.
“Dexter ran out of the house, and I just kept stabbing him until (Nash) fell,” she said.
As Jones described the abuse she experienced from Nash, she broke down in tears on the stand.
Sitting at the defense table, Lewis also wiped away tears.
