Family, friends mourn victims of park killings

• By SONIA SMITH
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 11, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 am.

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ST. FRANCISVILLE — Clutching her Bible, Elaine Johnson strode up to the pulpit at the end of her daughter and grandson’s joint funeral services Saturday and declared that she forgives the pair accused of killing them.

“I love them. I cannot hate them,” Johnson said of the accused, her cousin, Trendall Lashel Matthews, 22, and Dominique Dantoni Smith, 28. “God says to love.”

The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff‘s Office arrested Matthews and Smith on Tuesday, accusing them of killing Jessica Johnson Palmer, 23, and her son, Juan Palmer Jr., 3, on Sunday at Doyle’s Bayou Park in Zachary. The defendants also are accused of
attempting to kill two of Johnson Palmer’s other children at the same time and place.

Hundreds of mourners filled the pews and spilled into the aisles at Magnolia Full Gospel Baptist Church during the three-hour funeral service Saturday. Mother and son later were buried in their single white casket at New St. Luke Baptist Church Cemetery.

Friends and family remembered Johnson Palmer, a 2002 graduate of West Feliciana High School, during the service as an ambitious, outgoing woman who was dedicated to her four children and her church — St. Francisville’s Faith, Hope and Love Worship Center.

Johnson Palmer accepted Christ as a teenager at an  overnight retreat for young women at the church, said Robbin Hardy, wife of the Rev. Ronald E. Hardy Sr., pastor of Faith, Hope and Love Worship Center.

“She loved God with her whole heart,” Robbin Hardy said.

Johnson would travel with her children from their home in Baker to  the St. Francisville church every week. Little Juan  Palmer Jr. had such a passion for church that he earned the nickname, “preacher man.”

“He would sit there and say ‘Mama, turn the Bible, turn the Bible,’” recounted Sharita Spears, a member of Hardy’s congregation and a close friend of Johnson Palmer.

After church, Juan would wait quietly for Rev. Hardy at the front of his pulpit until Juan had his undivided attention.

“He told people himself that he was going to preach,” Rev. Hardy recalled.

Mourners praised Johnson Palmer’s 4-year-old daughter,  Lindsay Paige Johnson, who spent Sunday night hiding in the woods near the park, cradling  her  7-month-old sister in her arms. Hearing lawnmowers in the park Monday afternoon, Lindsay ran toward them until she collapsed.

Speakers at the Magnolia Full Gospel Baptist Church service  called Lindsay — whose throat was slit in the attacks — a “prophetess” for telling detectives of the horrors she witnessed. This information led to the arrest of her father, Smith, and Matthews, deputies said.