Lamora Williams lives rent-free in my mind even as she serves a life sentence for murder.
The kind of unexpected closure that feels neither kind nor complete came tonight. Insecure closure that floats like a fact in a pool of questions.
What made Lamora Williams snap?
The 24-year-old mother of four was overwhelmed by a hard rain of responsibility and quit her job because she couldn’t find a sitter for the kids.
“Nobody could tell what she was going through,” her older sister, Tabitha Hollingsworth, told me.
It was Friday October 13, 2017, when Williams called 911, describing her children’s burned bodies and brains on the kitchen floor.
Before the emergency call, the deranged woman called Jameel Penn, her sons’ father with Facetime, and panned the kitchen.
He called the police.
I broke the news for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that weekend. I made a point to volunteer for unpopular shifts and took on freelance feature writing when I could land a pitch.
Every brief could be a career-ending piece of writing. I agonized over my work as I shoved anxiety under my desk.
The possibility of reporting front page news nearly choked me with anxiety because every word had to be perfect or my article could be lost in the crowd of metro area briefs deep inside the newspaper.
Breaking news does just that. It breaks. But I didn’t let it break me despite driving me further into a weird sort of sadness.
Weird because I had my dream job. Sort of.
I took ownership of the story about a woman who put her sons in an oven and turned it on.
I requested the autopsy reports. Then I read them.
I wrote articles leaving out many details that I wanted to forget. In my determination to know what went so wrong with Williams, I questioned my ability to regulate emotion and manage stress.
Not long after, I made an appointment with a therapist.
I explained that, despite having had significant struggles with mental health and a borderline personality disorder, I was functioning well.
I mean, except for constant existential dread.
I hadn’t taken anything – prescribed or otherwise – while pregnant and raising young children; I even quit cigarettes a half year before getting pregnant, but around the time my kids started school, I knew something was off.
The psychologist listened and then shook loose an epiphany.
I was traumatizing myself daily with my job as a breaking news reporter.
I accepted a prescription for a low-dose antidepressant medication.
Not as a direct result of the work, but I left the newspaper for public media in 2018. My new role would have me focus more on solutions than the cascading list of mental and other health problems.
One in five people live with mental illness. Many of us hide it because we know something is wrong, but not what. And we’re often too ashamed to ask for help.
I’m grateful for the healing I accomplished in my 20s through the tough work of self-reflection and the grace of privilege. My partner and I met and became parents in our early 30s.
It took seven years for Lamora Williams to move from mentally unfit to stand trial to convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her 1 and 2-year-old sons.
When her sentenced was “handed down” on November 15, 2024, Lamora Williams was about the same age as I was when I became a mom, 31.
I empathize with her child-rearing frustration, but I doubt there was ever much attempt at understanding or treating her mental illness. And why would anyone care about her?
After all, she put her babies in an oven.