Paralyzed by Grief: After Pheonecia Ratliff’s Murder and Jamarquis Black’s Suicide

Domestic violence can lead to murder if the victim does not leave. In more incidences than the official figures reflect, domestic violence ends in murder/suicide: The perpetrator kills the victim – and too often, children, pets, and others as well – and then himself.

Incidences of murder/suicide almost always are covered in the news. Last summer, MCIR used press reports to compile our own database of these incidents. We are finding that they occur more frequently than the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, compiled from police reports, reflect.

Two well-known books by physicians on the aftermath of violence, “Trauma and Recovery” by Dr. Judith Herman and “The Body Keeps the Score” by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, cover domestic violence but do not mention murder/suicide specifically. There have been a few studies of the aftermath of murder/suicide, which have found that it tends to result in post-traumatic stress syndrome, especially in young children who have lost their parents.

In three columns, I report on three cases of murder/suicide in Mississippi and the form trauma has taken for those left behind. Here is the first.

After Domestic Violence Ends in Murder/Suicide: Part I

The night of May 14, 2020, in Canton, Jamarquis Black, 24, kidnapped his estranged girlfriend, Pheonecia Ratliff, 23. They had quarreled because he wanted custody of their baby daughter, Jordyn, barely 6 months old. Phoenicia had reported Jarmarquis’ stalking and threats to the police; he had been arrested, but bailed out of jail on May 11.

After a roughly 12-hour police chase ended near Brookhaven on the morning of May 15, Jamarquis shot and killed Pheonecia and then himself. Before he died, he persuaded Suzanne Ratliff, Pheonecia’s mother, to turn over baby Jordyn to his own mother, Elizabeth Black Wooten. Suzanne did what Jamarquis wanted; she hoped if she complied, he would release Pheonecia.

Suzanne Ratliff, left, with daughter Pheonecia in a photo taken of a picture on Pheonecia’s grave in Canton. Ann Marie Cunningham/MCIR

With Jordyn, Wooten returned home to Nesbit, two hours north of Canton. She refused Suzanne’s requests to allow Jordyn to attend Pheonecia’s funeral, or to visit her maternal grandmother in Canton, where she lives with three of Pheonecia’s four siblings.

Since Pheonecia’s death, Suzanne has seen Jordyn once, only by chance, in 2021. On impulse one Sunday, Suzanne stopped at Jamarquis’ father’s farm in rural Canton, where she discovered that Jordyn was visiting. Suzanne said that Jordyn told her she wanted to be with her, to drive away with her.

Suzanne said she had gotten a lawyer, and planned to go to court to challenge Jamarquis’ mother for joint custody of Jordyn.

A mere five days after Jamarquis and Pheonecia’s deaths, Elizabeth Black Wooten filed a court petition in Canton to be appointed Jordyn’s guardian, according to documents MCIR obtained from DeSoto County Chancery Court.

Wooten went to court in Canton in December 2020 to have a guardianship hearing moved from Madison County to DeSoto County. The motion was granted. The court reporter present explained that the judge felt the move made sense because the grandmother and granddaughter both had been living in DeSoto County since the deaths of Jordyn’s parents. Suzanne was not present in court and was not mentioned.

Several weeks later, on Jan. 26, 2021, the guardianship order was entered in DeSoto County Chancery Court. A motion for “miscellaneous relief” was granted on March 11, 2021, and Black’s attorney made a motion to withdraw from the case on Dec. 15, 2021 – meaning the case had been resolved and she had no further work to do. Once again, Suzanne was absent and was not mentioned in court.

What happened? Suzanne Ratliff and a close friend of Pheonecia did not return calls. MCIR turned to family lawyer Crystal L. Welch for insight.

Welch teaches family law at Mississippi College School of Law in Jackson. After Hurricane Katrina, the law school’s Family and Children’s Law Center was founded to help the many children in foster care who were displaced by the storm. Today, Welch’s law students gain clinical experience by working for the center’s Child Advocacy Program and its adoption and youth court clinics.

Periodically, Welch’s Adoption Legal Clinic holds mass adoption days, where as many as a dozen children who have been removed from abusive or neglectful situations are formally adopted in court. At a mass adoption day on Valentine’s Day, the children all received teddy bears, which they named after people who had helped them, along with their new families’ last names.

What is Jordyn’s life like in her new home in Nesbit? Chances are that since Wooten has remarried, she is more prosperous than Suzanne Ratliff, a single mother and grandmother who has worked at Subway and now at Walmart. “All I can offer [Jordyn],” Suzanne said in spring  2021, “is my loving heart.” To a judge, Welch said, a married woman like Wooten would appear to offer a more stable financial situation and home environment for a child. Chances are Jordyn, now 2, has a teddy bear.

Certainly, Welch said, Jordyn will have become attached to her paternal grandmother, “the adult who has been bathing, dressing and feeding her” for nearly two years. Welch pointed out that, if Suzanne Ratliff brought a custody case that changed her granddaughter’s living situation now, Jordyn, already suffering from the loss of her parents, would be retraumatized by losing her new attachment to her paternal grandmother. “Studies have found that removal can cause more psychological damage in a young child,” Welch said.

Welch said that had Suzanne moved as quickly as Elizabeth Black Wooten did, Suzanne may have had a better chance of getting custody of her granddaughter. In May 2020, right after Pheonecia’s death and her loss of Jordyn, Suzanne would have had to find a lawyer to file an emergency order for custody immediately. Welch believes the chancery court in Canton would have given it to Suzanne, with whom Jordyn and Pheonecia had been living: “It was the wrong time to distance the child from that side of her family.”

Did Suzanne hesitate, too overwhelmed by grief? She and Pheonecia had been caring for Jordyn together. Did she fear she didn’t have the strength or resources to look after a very young child by herself? Did she not get adequate legal help?

In the 1960s and 1970s, Mississippi had numerous federally funded legal clinics where people of modest means could find lawyers. These clinics no longer exist. There are the Mississippi Justice Center and the Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project, which hosts clinics periodically to help with problems from expungement to divorce. A free family law clinic was held at Hinds County Chancery Court in early February.

In any case, once in court Welch said she thinks Suzanne probably would have endured “an uphill battle”: A judge usually is not asked to consider sharing custody between two grandmothers. Such a case is rare, and it could “raise a red flag” for the court since Suzanne had cared for Jordyn since birth. It could give the impression that she is unable to care for the child alone.

What about baby Jordyn? At some point in her development, she will realize she is living with the mother of the man who killed her own mother. “You can’t hide [secrets] today,” Welch said.  “Sooner or later, Jordyn will go on the Internet and find out for herself what happened to her parents. It’s hard to say {how she will react}.”

Today, we know trauma can be passed from one generation to the next. When asked to predict a child’s future response to losing both parents, Welch says,  “It’s difficult to predict a child’s trauma response, because some are very resilient. But my first question is always, ‘What about the parents’ mental health?’ Some problems – depression, addiction – can be inherited.” (MCIR continues to investigate Jamarquis Black’s state of mind before his death.)  Any abuse can complicate a child’s future mental state.

Welch believes that Jordyn’s guardian should make sure her granddaughter has counseling from a therapist, who can explain and support her, before she’s old enough to have access to the Internet and learn the facts for herself. Welch herself believes strongly in grief counseling. Last summer, she lost her brother during the pandemic and found “I didn’t want people to mention it; that took me back to that dark spot, but grief counseling helps.

“Perhaps Suzanne Ratliff had to heal before she could take on a new role as a primary custodian” looking after Jordyn, Welch concluded.

Ann Marie Cunningham is MCIR’s Reporter in Residence.  Ann Marie reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2021 Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund, which provided training, engagement tools and mentoring, and funding to support this project.