Special to the Charlotte Observer
Asheville, July 20—Almost distracted with grief and under the constant care of physicians with the possibility of going to a hospital from shock, Mrs. Flora Braswell, the mother of Jean Braswell, who was slain on the evening of July 8th by Q.C. Sonner Jr., the 21-year-old Saluda boy who confessed the murder some days before his death in a Tryon hospital Saturday, received the news of the death of the boy, whom she had befriended with a calmness that comes of deep suffering with the simple wish that his soul might have been saved before his death. Mrs. Braswell has been for several days at the home of her sister, Mrs. Robert Stokes, in Montreat, attempting to recuperate from the illness that has come from grief.
Tragic in its fundamental element of death, the story of little Jean Braswell became cruel with its telling by the mother, the person closest of all to the child, and the person whom she thought she was going to meet when she went out on her first and last unchaperoned automobile ride.
Insane Jealousy
Insane jealousy and the desire to get some of the money which Jean would have inherited from her grandfather, C.W. Johnston, millionaire textile man of Charlotte, Mrs. Braswell believes to have been the motive for the killing on the ride which Jean took with Sonner on the night of July 8th, the first time, Mrs. Braswell said, that her daughter had neve been out alone with a boy, and a direct result, she believed, of Jean’s constant refusal to elope with him.
Thin, pale and haggard from suffering, Mrs. Braswell talked for more than an hour of “Jeanie,” the little girl whom she had guarded so carefully, had devoted her life to, and who had just reached the age to begin to appreciate the pleasures of life.
“She was like a ray of sunshine, always full of living, and yet so young and innocent. She was too young to know what marriage meant, and she told me several times that she was not in love with Q.C. He wanted to marry her, and had told me so, and I knew that he was urging her to run away and marry him. But she had laughed at the idea, and told me not to worry, she would never run away from me for anything.
“She was just a baby,” she continued with the tears coming into her eyes. “A baby with golden hair and big blue eyes, who loved everybody. She had never had any affairs with men, and when Q.C. told me that he wanted to marry Jeanie, I told him to wait until she grew up and then he could talk to me.
“She had boy friends as all girls have who are pretty and attractive, and who have a home where they can entertain their friends. There were many little boys who liked Jean, but not one that she liked any better than the others.
Falling in Love
“I was worried about Q.C. when I realized that he was falling in love with Jean, and I told her never to go out alone with him. On the Sunday before she was shot, he flew into an ugly rage because she went to church with another boy, and several times showed fits of jealousy. But he never was anything but a perfect gentleman to Jean.
“She met him in our own home in Tryon about five weeks before the tragedy, and was introduced to Jean by his younger brother, Sammy, a boy of 16, who had known Jean for some time. He came over to Tryon often, and when he went to Saluda, a few days before the murder, he came constantly to the hotel.
“Jean and I were his best friends,” she said, her voice breaking again. “I felt sorry for him. I knew that he was not Jean’s social equal, and I told her so, but like all girls of her age, she answered me, laughing, ‘but he is such a good dancer, mother.’
“I was so worried that I thought of taking Jean away, but I had wanted to go abroad with her in September, and concluded that it might be better for everyone if I let him see her and try to handle the situation myself.
“Q. C. had a very unhappy time at home, and had gotten in trouble with the police and had been fined a few days before for speeding, and I knew that he was upset. I felt sorry for him, and had often talked to him about making something of himself. He liked to come to our house, and on the night before the murder, had dinner with us. He wanted to take Jean to ride, but I refused to let her go. She had never been out with a boy alone and had been to but one big dance in her life, that a few weeks before at the Blue Ridge school, when I chaperoned her myself.
Left Them Alone
“On Wednesday I had planned to entertain my church circle in Tryon, and left the children at the hotel, in the care of Mrs. Fulton, the manager, for the afternoon. I knew that Sonny, the little boy, was safe with Jean, and as I left she said to me, the last words I ever heard her speak:
“Don’t worry, Mummie. I’ll take care of Sonny.”
Sonny, the last member of the family to see Jean alive, and perhaps the one person who might have averted the tragedy by complying with his sister’s request that he go with her “to meet mother,” is a happy little fellow of 10, now with his mother and sister in Black Mountain and talking constantly of Jean.
Except for Sonny’s conversation with his older sister, and her words to Mrs. Fulton that she was going to “meet mother,” no one knows what happened on the first and last ride that the little girl took unchaperoned.
She was eating supper, according to Sonny’s story, waiting for Jimmie Wilkes, the little 14-year-old boy who was coming to call when Sonner drove up in his Ford. What ie said no one knowns, and what persuasion he used to convince her that it was all right for her to go out alone, no one knows.
“Come go with us, Sonny,” Jean urged the little brother. “We are going to meet mother.”
But Sonny said no, and the little girl drove off, calling back to Mrs. Fulton that she would meet her mother on the road.
And at the same time, her mother, just starting for Saluda, was felling worried and depressed.
“Perhaps I had better ‘phone the kiddies,” she said to a friend who was with her as they started away from the house.
“It’s all right,” her friend assured her, “we will be there in a few minutes.
Lost Consciousness
But the minutes lengthened into days, for Mrs. Braswell lost all consciousness and remembers nothing but the efforts of those who broke the news to her, to prevent her from starting for the scene of the shooting. Too ill to attend the funeral, she lay for days I a semi-conscious condition, and although conscious now and able to talk, she shows no improvement, and will probably be taken to a hospital in an effort to quiet the nervous reaction which has set in from the shock.
Nancy and Sonny, the little sister and brother, are constantly with their mother, bringing her flowers, and consoling her as best they can, talking together of Jean and how much they miss her.
While bitter toward the boy who had killed her daughter, Mrs. Braswell had but one, wish today and that was that the boy might have died as much a Christian as her daughter, and thankfulness that Jeanie was found with a smile on her face, and apparently unconscious of what had happened to her.
“I thank God that the end was peaceful,” the mother said. “I didn’t see her, but they told me she was still smiling and her hands were folded quietly in her lap. She never knew what had happened, and it is my only comfort that she died as happily as she lived.”
Sonner Was Weak
Sonner, according to Mrs. Braswell’s description, was a weak boy, and not very good looking, but a good dancer, and a boy older than the children with whom Jean was associating. Another story of a young girl being flattered by the attentions of an older man, and in this case a man with the glamour of New York and professional dancing about him. He had inherited some money from an aunty and gone to the University of North Carolina and to Clemson College for a short time and had then taken the remainder and spent the winter in New York.
Had the boy lived, Mrs. Braswell and her father, C.W. Johnston of Charlotte, would have fought the case to the end, and all arrangements had been made to put the machinery of the law to work.
“But I felt he wouldn’t live,” the mother said. “God would punish him, I knew, for what he had done. It is better, perhaps, that he died.”
From page 3 of the Concord Daily Tribune, Wednesday, July 21, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-07-21/ed-1/seq-3/
