A teenage girl in short sleeves ran screaming down a sandy road. A man broke away from a group of people and chased after her, pleading with her to stop. A massive Great Dane followed him.
The girl slowed and stopped off the road in a wooded area. The group caught up with her. Some stood back as others swarmed her. She had just learned that her 18-year-old brother was one of the four young people murdered in a mobile home that afternoon.
Two hours earlier, at about 2 p.m., Faye Hobson was driving home from work. As she pulled into her driveway on Heron Road, she saw the smoke billowing from the mobile home across the street.
She ran into her home and called 911. The dispatcher asked if anyone was inside the burning house. Hobson said she didn’t know, but there was a car in the driveway. Then she ran across the street. Other people were there, trying to get inside the burning trailer.
“There were two or three women beating on the door,” Hobson said. “Some guy came up and kicked the door open. That’s when I saw them pull Joe out.”
She was referring to one of the murder victims, Joseph Allen Harden, 19.
Hobson returned to her house to get her 20-year-old son, Harvey Daryl Hobson. She opened his bedroom door, but he wasn’t there. She began to worry that he might be inside the mobile home across the street.
“He might be in there,” Hobson was still saying two hours later, as she sat surrounded by family and friends in her front yard. “I just wish I knew where he was.”
Hobson was sitting in a kitchen chair that someone had brought outside. A telephone sat in her lap. Her hands shook as she as she smoked cigarettes, watching firefighters and investigators mill about the charred trailer across the street.
An SBI agent led Hobson away from the group to speak with her.
A few minutes later, Hobson returned.
“She asked me what he was wearing,” Hobson said. “ I didn’t see him before I left for work today. It was 6 o’clock, and he was still sleeping. I told her most of the time he wears Timberland shoes.”
At about 6 p.m., Hobson learned one of the bodies inside the trailer was her son’s.
Veta Justice and her husband, Carl, said Saturday morning that they didn’t know where to start planning for the funeral arrangements for their 18-year-old son, Carl Jr. (“C.J.”) They thought maybe they would have the funeral with the other victims’ families.
“They were all friends,” Veta Justice said, as she sat next to her husband in their living room. “Joe was C.J.’s best friend, they were roommates. C.J. bought Joe that car.”
C.J.’s younger sister, brother, aunts and family friends had gathered at the home on Heavenwood Road.
Presents sat under the Christmas tree. The Great Dane, named Lucifer, walked by and knocked an ornament off the tree. No one picked it up.
Grief, Anger Mix
The family said they had been devastated when they learned that C.J. had been killed.
“He was a good person,” C.J.’s 14-year-old brother, Billy, said. “If you needed anything, he’d give it to you.”
But their grief was mixed with anger. The family wanted revenge.
“Mario (Phillips, a suspect arrested in connection with the murders) was supposed to be one of C.J.s friends,” Veta Justice said.
“Well that’s the thing, they were all friends,” Carl Justice said. “He (Phillips) just stayed there (in his mother’s house across the street) and watched the families crying. That was cold-blooded.”
Rumors Fly
The family said they don’t know the motive behind the murders.
Rumors started flying around the Carolina Lakes subdivision soon after the mobile home fire was put out. One rumor was that the victims just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
“This is a loss for the whole community, not just the families,” said Stephanie Spence, C.J.’s aunt said. “Being able to walk down the street late at night — that’s not there anymore. The community needs to pull together right now.”
