Stranger supports Paddock witness
Woman with her own dark secret comforts victim's sibling
Published: Tue, Jun. 03, 2008 12:30AM
Modified Tue, Jun. 03, 2008 05:29AM
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closeSMITHFIELD -- Last week, Jessy Paddock was just a slight young woman on Joyce Burkett's television screen, describing cruel punishment she said was unleashed by her stepmother Lynn Paddock.
Burkett, 66, a retiree who lives in Smithfield, shuddered to think of all that Jessy and her adopted siblings testified about enduring in a rural farmhouse outside of Smithfield. Burkett told her husband, Leo, they must go to court.
They would be there, she said, to look the Paddock children in the eye when they told of the kind of abuse Burkett wishes she'd been brave enough to talk about when she was a child.
DECEMBER 2002: Sean's day-care teacher called social workers when the infant arrived shivering, his lips blue from the cold. Social workers found no heat in the home; Sean's uncle, Ron Ford Jr., takes in the children but has to give them up six months later when finances become too strained.
MARCH 2003: Sean's father is charged with abusing the boy's siblings. (Dwayne Ford later pleads guilty. He is put on probation and ordered to stay away from the children.)
JUNE 2003: Sean and his siblings move into a Wake County foster home.
SEPTEMBER 2004: After several attempts to reunite the children with their birth mother, social workers give up, and they are legally severed from her care. The children are available for adoption.
OCTOBER 2004: Children's Home Society lines up Johnny and Lynn Paddock, a Johnston County couple who have adopted three other foster children through the private agency, to adopt the Ford children.
JANUARY 2005: Sean and his siblings first visit the Paddocks' farm outside Smithfield. Sean returns from the weekend visit with a bruise on his backside. Lynn Paddock said he fell off a bunk bed. He and his siblings said Paddock whipped him for playing with the family dog.
FEBRUARY 2005: Social workers conclude that Sean tumbled from the bunk bed and the Ford children resume their visits to the Paddock farm.
JULY 2005: The adoption is completed.
FEBRUARY 2006: Sean suffocates after being tightly bundled in blankets. Investigators determine Lynn Paddock has been spanking the children with plastic plumbing supply line. Lynn Paddock is charged with first-degree murder and child abuse. She has been in the Johnston County jail since.
FEBRUARY 2008: Sean’s biological grandparents sue the Paddocks, the state Department of Health and Human Services, Wake County Human Services and private adoption agency Children’s Home Society for the boy’s death. Ron Ford Sr. wants to learn how the agencies failed to protect Sean. The suit is still pending.
PADDOCK'S STORY
Jessy Paddock testified about her memories of the week that her little brother Sean died. She told jurors that her stepmother, Lynn Paddock, told her that she had prayed for a solution to Sean's habit of roaming the farmhouse at night. She soon began wrapping Sean tightly in blankets at night, Jessy testified.
Through much of the afternoon Monday, defense attorneys pressed Jessy about dozens of lies she told to investigators and social workers in the early months after Sean's death.
Jessy said deceit came so naturally.
"I've been doing it for so long, it's not like I thought about it," she said. "I was more forced to lie than taught to lie. It was just the life I led."
Jessy, now 20, was offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony. She was an adult when Sean died and the other children were said to have been abused; Jessy told jurors that sometimes Paddock ordered her to spank the children.
Prosecutors will continue to offer evidence against Paddock this morning.
More Lynn Paddock
Paddock's first-degree murder trial in the death of her 4-year-old adopted son, Sean, has drawn a few onlookers to court each day. For some, morbid curiosity brings them to the Johnston County courthouse to pass long hours on hard benches.
For others, the draw is something familiar about the testimony.
Burkett says she survived incessant belt beatings by her own father as she grew up in Montana. She kept the secret for decades, until she confronted her father, now dead. He was never charged.
The Burketts sit in the middle of the courtroom, staring at Paddock's estranged children as they testify. Joyce Burkett nods encouragingly now and again. When defense attorneys press the Paddock children harder than Burkett likes, she glares. Mostly, she silently prays that Jessy will survive another day.
"I wanted to give Jessy strength," Joyce Burkett said. "No one's here for her. Where are all these church people she speaks of? Where is a court advocate?"
Burkett and Jessy spoke for the first time Monday morning.
Jessy rushed out of the courtroom in tears after a prosecutor showed her pictures of Sean's bruised, blistered back. She fled to the women's bathroom.
Burkett followed. Without a word, Burkett opened her arms. Jessy collapsed into them.
Jessy shook; Burkett held tight.
"How could someone do something like that and get away with it?" Jessy finally asked Burkett.
Burkett nodded and said, "My father went to his grave at 90 and got away with it."
mandy.locke@newsobserver.com or (919) 829-8927
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