To be Executed but she begs for Mercy:Buried Elderly couple Alive,They died holding their hands…..

To be Executed but she begs for Mercy:Buried Elderly couple Alive,They died holding their hands…..

In a matter of hours, lawyers for a woman sitting on death row for the 2005 kidnapping and murder of a Jacksonville couple will go before the Florida Supreme Court. Thirty-three-year-old Tiffany Cole is asking for a new trial on the grounds that her original defense attorneys were ineffective. Cole was one of three people convicted in the crime.

Alan Wade and Cole’s boyfriend, Michael Jackson—the man identified as the mastermind—also sit on death row. A third man, Bruce Nixon, testified against the others and is serving 45 years in prison. Prosecutors said the four conspirators kidnapped, robbed, and buried this couple, 61-year-old Carol and Reggie Sumner, burying them alive in Charlton County, Georgia.

Tonight, Channel 4’s Ashley Harding spoke with Reggie Sumner’s sister. “We believe that they got a fair trial and we believe that they got what was due to them,” said Reverend Jean Clark. For the last 10 years, it has been very hard and very painful. Every day, she thinks about her brother, Reggie Sumner, and his wife, Carol. Still, her thoughts are never far from the four people involved in their murders, including the woman now asking for a new trial on the grounds that her lawyers were ineffective. “Most people are going to try to come back with something like that after the fact because they are going to try to find a loophole to get off,” she said. “But justice has a voice, and justice has to be served.”

On the evening of July 8, 2005, Carol and Reggie Sumner answered a knock at their front door in Jacksonville, Florida. Two young men stood on the step and asked to use the telephone. Carol let them in. Within seconds, the telephone cord was ripped from the wall.

Carol and Reggie Sumner were 61 years old, both in poor health, and both entirely unable to fight back. They were bound with duct tape, blindfolded, and forced into the trunk of their own car. They were then driven 35 miles across the state line into Georgia to a remote stretch of woods where a grave had been dug two days earlier—six feet long and four feet deep—specifically for them.

Carol and Reggie had worked free of their restraints somewhere on that long drive through the dark. When the trunk opened, they were not bound. They were holding each other. They were praying. It made no difference. The medical examiner who performed the autopsies found dirt in their airways, their mouths, and their throats. Carol and Reggie Sumner were alive when they were placed in that grave. They died from the dirt that covered them.

The person who made all of it possible was not a stranger. She was a young woman the Sumners had treated like a daughter. They had sold her a car. They had told her she was welcome in their home anytime. They had shared their finances with her because she was family. Her name was Tiffany Cole.

Two days before she helped take them to that hole, she had stood in those same Georgia woods holding a flashlight while the grave was dug. After it was done, Cole, her boyfriend Michael Jackson, and their two associates checked into a motel. Jackson withdrew cash from the Sumners’ ATM account. They ordered food. They hired a limousine. They drank champagne and held the stolen money in their hands while photographs were taken. Those photographs were shown to the jury, who deliberated for less than 90 minutes.

Tiffany Anne Cole was born on December 3, 1981, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her mother, Shirley Duncan, was 16 years old and unmarried when Tiffany arrived. Her father, David Duncan, was in prison. Shirley had no partner, no income of her own, and no real experience managing a household. She moved in with her own mother, and the three of them—grandmother, teenage mother, and newborn—set up a life together in Charleston. The arrangement was held together largely by the grandmother. Shirley was young and still figuring out how to be a person, let alone a parent.

Tiffany’s earliest years passed inside this setup, and for a time, things were stable enough. The house had routines. There were adults present. There was food on the table and a bed to sleep in. That period ended when David Duncan was released from prison. David came home to a household that had been managing without him for the entirety of Tiffany’s life. He was not stepping into an established role; he was inserting himself into an arrangement that had already learned to work around his absence. The adjustment was hard for everyone. He and Shirley had never built a functioning partnership, and the tension between them surfaced quickly. Arguments became a regular feature of the house.

The stability the grandmother had maintained was harder to keep in place with David there. The family began to move—not once, but repeatedly—from one neighborhood to another. The reasons varied, but the pattern was consistent. Every time Tiffany began to settle into a school, a street, or a set of faces she recognized, they were packing up and leaving. The effect of that constant relocation was specific: Tiffany could not form lasting friendships. She could not build the kind of slow, accumulated familiarity with a place that gives young people a sense of belonging. She arrived somewhere, began to adjust, and then left. The cycle repeated often enough that she stopped expecting permanence.

When Tiffany was around 5 years old, Shirley gave birth to a boy. The household added a new member, and the demands on everyone increased. Tiffany was still very young, but she was the oldest person in the house who was consistently present. In the way that things happen in households stretched thin, the responsibility of watching over the baby began to fall to her. It was not because anyone formally assigned it to her; it simply happened. She was there, she was capable, and nobody else was managing it. She fed the baby, kept him occupied when Shirley was at work, and made sure the necessary tasks were done. People who knew the family during this period described a young person carrying a weight that did not belong on her.

The parents’ relationship did not improve; the arguments continued and eventually became unsustainable. The marriage fell apart. Tiffany was now split between two homes, moving between two unstable environments. At her mother’s home, Shirley entered into a relationship with a man named Rick, who became a stepfather figure. When Tiffany was around 12, Shirley and Rick had a son together. Tiffany’s caretaking role expanded accordingly. She helped with both younger siblings, feeding them and watching over them.

The household ran on a set of expectations that did not account for Tiffany’s age. She was made to do her own laundry while she was still in kindergarten. When she wet the bed—something young people do—the punishment was not a quiet correction. She was sent to sit on the toilet and told to stay there until she could leave. On at least one occasion, she sat there long enough that she fell asleep. Her aunt, Nancy Cole, visited the house and witnessed the conditions. Nancy saw a young person being held to adult standards in an environment that gave her no room to simply be a child. The penalties for ordinary behavior were disproportionate and applied without patience. Nobody intervened.

David Duncan’s home presented a different and more serious problem. During the years Tiffany moved between her parents’ houses, David subjected her to sexual abuse. It began when she was young and continued for nearly two years. Nobody outside the house addressed it. The abuse happened inside the walls of a private home, and the world around it continued as though nothing was wrong. When it became unbearable, Tiffany ran away from her father’s home.

What those years did to her was not visible from the outside. She did not carry a sign. She went to school, carried her books, and sat in class. But the experience of being abused by the person who was supposed to protect her above everyone else had worked its way into the foundation of how she understood relationships. She grew up learning that the people closest to her were capable of causing her harm. She grew up in an environment where being hurt and being cared for were part of the same experience. There was no model in her life for what trust without damage looked like. She did not know how to expect better because nothing in her upbringing had demonstrated that better was available to her.

School remained the one place where Tiffany functioned on terms that had nothing to do with any of it. She was a capable student. She played the flute in the school band, was on the cheerleading squad, and participated in Girl Scouts. Nobody looking at her would have suspected what she was managing at home. Every afternoon she left school and went back to the house, where there was no adult she could speak honestly to about what David had done. There was no intervention, no support system. There was only the discipline of continuing because stopping was not something the situation allowed.

By the time she reached her mid-teens, the weight of everything she had been carrying built to a point where the effort of continuing was unsustainable. Tiffany Cole dropped out of school in the 10th grade. She had kept herself going through the earlier years, but the life she was managing outside school hours had become heavier than her motivation to stay. She left and did not go back. The decision closed off options. Without a diploma, the range of work available to her was narrow. She found waitress work in restaurants around Charleston. She was good at it in the way that people who have spent their whole lives managing other people’s needs tend to be. She anticipated what people wanted before they asked. The job was not glamorous, but it kept her functional.

The pattern of her working life was the same as the pattern of everything else: movement without direction, effort without anchor. In her personal life, she moved from one damaging relationship to another. She stayed in situations that most people would have identified quickly as harmful because she had grown up inside a household that gave her no framework for recognizing harm. One of those relationships was with a man named Wayne, the son of a local sheriff. He was physically abusive. When that relationship ended, there were other men, other periods of adjustment, other cycles of attaching herself to someone and finding herself worse off. She worked hard at these relationships, organizing herself around the needs of the person she was with, but the people she chose repeatedly took more than they gave.

Her last significant relationship before 2005 was with a man named Brian. Brian had a seizure disorder that left him unable to maintain steady employment. Tiffany fell into the role she had practiced her entire life: she cared for him the way she had cared for her younger siblings. She organized his medications, managed logistics, and structured her schedule around his needs. They were together until the spring of 2005. When the relationship ended, it hit Tiffany hard. She had built her entire daily structure around Brian, and when that structure was gone, she was left without the scaffolding she had been using to hold herself together.

The timing made it worse. Almost at the same moment, her father, David Duncan, received a terminal cancer diagnosis. Tiffany moved back in with him. Whatever she felt about her father was complicated. He had abused her, yet she found herself back there, organizing his medications, keeping track of his appointments, and sitting with him through the days when the illness left him unable to function. She did the things that needed doing; it was the one thing she had always known how to do.

David had settled in Ladson, a small town just outside Charleston. Down the same block, a couple had recently arrived from the broader Charleston area. They were retired, both in their early 60s, and they had chosen Ladson as the place where they intended to spend the next, quieter phase of their lives together. Their names were Carol and Reggie Sumner. The Sumners knew David. They were the kind of neighbors who noticed when someone nearby was having a difficult time. They helped when they could, checking in and offering what was available. They extended that warmth to Tiffany, who was coming and going from David’s house regularly.

The Sumners had a green Chevrolet Lumina they were no longer using—solid and reliable. They offered it to Tiffany at a price she could manage, with the arrangement that she would pay it off in small monthly installments over time. There was no formal contract, no interest, no penalty for a late payment. It was an act of generosity. Tiffany drove to Jacksonville, where the Sumners had since moved for Reggie’s health, to deliver the payments in person. The visits gave her a reason to see them, and the Sumners had already told her she was welcome whenever she was in the area. To Carol and Reggie Sumner, Tiffany was almost like the daughter they had never had.

In the early summer of 2005, Tiffany was at her lowest point. She went to a hotel gathering with a group of friends—the kind of trip people take when they need to be somewhere other than where their problems are. At the hotel lobby, a man she had never seen before inserted himself into the group. He was pleasant and easy to talk to, holding attention without seeming to try too hard. By the time the evening ended, he had moved with the group. He had no car and no money, but he had confidence. His name was Michael James Jackson. He was 23 years old and came from the Charleston area.

Jackson attached himself to Tiffany’s group with ease. By the time the weekend was over, he and Tiffany had exchanged information. Within weeks, they were in a relationship. Jackson had a connection in Jacksonville: a man named Alan Lindell Wade, whom he had known for at least a year. Jackson spoke about Wade to Tiffany, casually, as though the trips south were simply a matter of catching up.

Jackson’s relationship with Tiffany was two months old when he first raised the idea of driving to Jacksonville. He had her car and her resources; he had inserted himself into her daily life with a speed that left very little space between her schedule and his. The trip to Jacksonville was framed as a visit to Wade, and Tiffany had her own reason to go: the monthly payment for the Chevrolet Lumina. Jackson pushed for the trip, and Tiffany agreed.

Alan Lindell Wade had grown up in circumstances that gave him very little foundation. He was born in 1987 and raised primarily by his mother, Freda, after his parents divorced. Freda battled cancer during his upbringing, and the chemotherapy created a profound cognitive fog, rendering her unable to function at the level her son needed. The family moved frequently. Money was a problem. By the summer of 2005, Alan Wade was 47 days past his 18th birthday. He had no steady employment, no clear direction, and a drug habit that made everything harder to navigate.

Wade had a best friend who lived in Baker County, Florida—a rural stretch of land north of Jacksonville. The friend’s name was Bruce Kent Nixon Jr., and the two had grown up alongside each other. Their loyalty operated on instinct rather than calculation. When Jackson arrived in Jacksonville with Tiffany and they spent the night at the Sumner home on Reed Avenue, Jackson sat across the table from Carol and Reggie, quietly taking stock of everything he saw. He watched them move through their medications, observed how slowly they walked, and noticed the house, the furnishings, and the accumulation of things that careful people collect over a lifetime. He listened when Carol mentioned that they had recently sold their South Carolina property and cleared approximately $99,000.

He did not ask questions. He filed what he heard and went on with the evening. On the drive back to Charleston, Jackson spoke about the Sumners. He spoke about their frailty, their isolation, the money in their accounts, and the fact that nothing inside that house could stop two people who decided to walk in and take what was there. Tiffany listened and added what she knew: the couple’s medical schedule, the rhythm of their days, and the layout of the house.

Back in Charleston, Jackson brought Wade into the discussion. He described the opportunity he believed the Sumners represented. Wade listened and did not walk away. The three of them—Jackson, Cole, and Wade—began making additional trips between Charleston and Jacksonville. Each visit built out the picture Jackson was assembling. When Jackson decided he needed a fourth person, Wade knew immediately who to call. He picked up the phone, and Nixon answered. Wade told Nixon there was a plan to rob someone and that he needed help digging a hole. He did not name the targets or explain what the hole was for, only that there was money in it. Nixon agreed without pressing for details. He went to his neighborhood, took four shovels from nearby properties, collected them, and waited for the others.

Before the final preparations were made, the group took a detour. Jackson, Cole, Wade, and a fourth woman drove to Myrtle Beach for a few days of loose spending. On the drive back, the group stopped at a flea market. Jackson and Wade walked the stalls and came back with pocket knives and BB guns manufactured to look like real firearms. The guns were convincing enough in low light to pass for the real thing. Cole was in the car when they returned; she saw what they had bought and said nothing that indicated alarm.

The people they were planning against had no knowledge of any of it. Carol and Reggie Sumner were on Reed Avenue in Jacksonville, moving through the quiet routines their health required. Carol Margaret Alfred was born on February 16, 1944, in North Charleston. She attended Garrett High School, where she sat in the same classrooms as a boy named James Reginald Sumner. Carol married after high school and became a devoted mother to her daughter, Rhonda, and her son, Fred. Her second marriage became something far more damaging than a simple failure; her husband was physically abusive. In 1987, he came to her home and shot her multiple times before turning the gun on himself. Carol survived. Rhonda spent nearly a year helping her mother through recovery. Carol’s physical condition was poor for a long time, but she went back to work as soon as she was able, working night shifts at a Belk department store when the income was not enough.

James Reginald Sumner was born on September 18, 1943, also in North Charleston. He served in the United States Navy after graduation before returning to civilian life. He married and found work with CSX Railroad, where he built a career over decades—steady, reliable, and present. Reggie’s first marriage ended in divorce, and he put his energy into his job, keeping his private life simple. He eventually moved to the Jacksonville area, where he purchased a house.

In the year 2000, Carol was working an evening shift at a cable television company in Charleston, handling customer calls. One of those calls came from a man who was having trouble with his account. It was Reggie Sumner. They recognized each other from high school. They were in their late 50s. Both had spent four decades living entire lives, marrying other people, raising families, and surviving things they had not expected to survive. They stayed on the call longer than necessary, exchanged contact information, and from that phone call, they began spending time together.