Edward Lamon Blunt was outside WACR in his car waiting for a friend who was a disc jockey at the radio station on 14th Avenue North in Columbus.
A man approached his vehicle claiming to be God.
Feeling threatened, Blunt eventually resorted to hitting the man with a tire iron.
That was January 1996.
Time does not heal all wounds.
Blunt lost his freedom. Michael Taylor lost his life.
Even after being released from prison in November, Blunt, 42, said the incident is too painful to revisit.
“It’s been too hard, too long and too much pain for my family and the victim’s family …” Blunt said in a telephone interview.
Though Taylor left the scene, his mother found his body later that day in the bathroom of his residence.
The cause of death, according to court documents, was blunt-force trauma.
Blunt was found guilty of Taylor’s murder in Lowndes County Circuit Court in August 1996 and sentenced to life in prison.
And Blunt spent 15 years in prison.
Blunt appealed the decision to the Mississippi Court of Appeals, but it was denied in June 1998. Another motion for post-conviction relief on the basis of ineffective counsel failed in Lowndes County Circuit Court in February 2009.
In February, the Mississippi Court of Appeals reversed the decision and ordered a new trial. According to the ruling, Blunt argued that his then-attorney, Richard Burdine, did not “instruct the jury properly on self-defense.”
Jurors could have found Blunt guilty of the lesser crime manslaughter, according to jury instructions.
“We find that Blunt received ineffective assistance of counsel at his murder trial, based on trial counsel’s request for an improper self-defense instruction,” the ruling reads.
In the latest Lowndes County Circuit Court session, the case was finally put to rest.
Blunt said he was sitting in his vehicle when Taylor approached his vehicle “and reached in as if to choke Blunt,” according to the Mississippi Court of Appeals ruling.
That ruling also notes Taylor suffered from schizophrenia, and when untreated resulted in delusions and violent behavior.
Blunt lived in Columbus at the time and was a truck driver with Royal Trucking. His most recent address listed is in Leakesville.
When he finally got his new day in court, Blunt asked to enter a guilty plea to manslaughter.
“The family hired me,” said Shane Tompkins, Blunt’s most recent defense attorney. “I met with the district attorney’s office and negotiated a plea deal of manslaughter.”
The court sentenced Blunt on Nov. 15 to 15 years in the Mississippi Department of Corrections, with credit for time already served. The sentence includes five years of post-release supervision and a $1,000 fine.
“After they remanded it down for a new trial, that was an arrangement we worked out between his attorney and the victim’s family,” Rhonda Hayes-Ellis, assistant district attorney, said of Blunt’s new sentence.
There are times when, if a family has already gone through one trial, they may have different emotions and not want to “relive it,” Hayes-Ellis said. “So, what we do is we explain the situation to the families and leave it up to them how they want us to handle it, and that’s how we resolved it this time.”
Once the deal was reached and the sentence was ordered, Blunt was out that same day, Tompkins said.
Blunt declined to talk further about the case because he did not want to disrespect Taylor’s family or put them through more pain.
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