Marquis “Marlo” Stevenson never had a father figure in his life.
He was just 7 years old when his father, Andre Judd, died from gunshot wounds on the side of Highway 61 in Clarksdale. No one was ever charged in the shooting.
Annette Stevenson believes her son tried to mimic his father in some ways.
She said while he rarely saw his father when he was younger, as her son got older, around the ages of 15 and 16, he started to reach out to his father’s relatives to learn more about who his father had been.
“He never really talked about his dad a lot,” said Annette, who also has a daughter, who is three years older than her half-brother.
Stevenson’s childhood was filled with trouble – at school and with the law. There would be school suspensions for being late and acting up in class.
“He used to stay in trouble all the time,” she said. “He used to be a bad kid. We’d talk to him, talk to him, talk to him. But like kids, they got their own mind. As he was growing, he started realizing, ‘We can’t get you out of trouble all the time.’ We tried our best.”
He would be sent to an alternative school and eventually earn his GED. Stevenson, who his mother says is a big reader and lover of books, would then attend Coahoma Community College, where he would receive a welding certificate and he even started working, doing welding jobs.
While Annette had Marlo when she was 21, she says it was her mother, Pearlie Haynes, who raised him and provided him a home at her house on Coker Street in Jonestown. And it was his grandmother who Marlo had his closest relationship with.
“I can’t say he wasn’t raised right, because he was,” said Annette, who has spent the past 12 years working as a clerk in the emergency room at the Northwest Mississippi Medical Center in Clarksdale.
“He was very respectful at home. We had no problems. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t sell drugs.
“But whatever he do out on those streets, we don’t know.”
In September 2013, Stevenson would be sentenced to five years of probation after he pled guilty to firing a gun into an unoccupied car in February 2011.
Bigger trouble would come in December 2014.
Stevenson had often gone to the area around Cherry Street in Clarksdale as one of the mother of his six children lived in the area. She also happened to be the cousin of Marvin Leflore.
According to police and Annette, the trouble started over a Facebook feud a few days earlier between Leflore and one of Stevenson’s cousins.
Police said the 20-year-old Leflore was raking and bagging leaves in front of his house at 844 Cherry St. on Dec. 13 when Stevenson pulled up in a truck and called out to Leflore. The two men would exchange words and Stevenson would then shoot Leflore, killing him, according to police.
The day was Annette’s birthday. She had seen her son earlier in the day when she’d sent him to town to get some ice for the fish fry celebration they had planned for later in the day.
“He took my momma’s truck and he came right on back. When he brought me my ice, he said, ‘Momma, you owe me some change.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ll never go broke. I’ll give you your change later on.’
“After that, people was calling me, ‘Where’s Marlo at? Where’s Marlo at? They said, ‘He’s just killed somebody.’”
She said her son would call his grandmother later that day, proclaiming his innocence. He would later go with his attorney to the police station, where he would be arrested and charged with Leflore’s murder.
He would spend the next eight months in the Coahoma County Jail until he was able to post bond.
During that three years he was out on bond, Stevenson acquired a Commercial Driver’s License.
“He was trying to get his self together,” Annette said.
There has been a string of relationships in Stevenson’s relatively young life. He has six children with six different women (and they all get along, according to his mother). He had his first child, a little girl, when he was 20. His last child, Marquis Stevenson Jr., was born in February 2017, at a time when Marlo was out on bond awaiting his trial and just a few short months before he would be incarcerated again on a rape charge.
“He told me, ‘They’re gonna have to kill me, because I’m not going back to jail,’” Annette recalled.
And he didn’t make it easy as he fled to his grandmother’s attic, trying to hide, when police came to arrest him. They would eventually have to use mace to get him down from the rafters, Annette said.
But, again, jail wouldn’t hold Stevenson. On Aug. 11, 2017, just two weeks after his arrest, he and three others – Cordarius Thomas, Percy Bryant and LeAndrew Booker – would escape from the jail. While the other three would be found within a week, it wouldn’t be until Oct. 3, 2017, when police would capture Stevenson in a residence in Horn Lake. Annette says she never saw nor spoke to her son when he was on the run from police.
Pearlie Haynes, who is 67, was there in the courtroom in mid-May when her grandson’s murder trial began and she was there the next day when the guilty verdict was read.
Members of the Leflore family were also present at the trial. Annette said she hasn’t spoken to Marvin Leflore’s mother, but she does feel sympathy for her.
“I know she lost a child and I don’t know how that feels. But I do kind of know what she’s going through… I can’t see mine. He’s not here,” she said. “But I know she can’t ever see her’s, and I can see mine. I don’t wanna feel what they’re going through.”
Before the start of the second day of the trial, prosecutors would offer Stevenson a plea deal – 20 to 30 years in prison. But her son refused to even consider it, Annette said.
“He said, ‘Mom, they’re trying to give me a plea. But I ain’t gonna take no plea. I didn’t do it,’” she recalled of the conversation she and her mother had with her son.
That gamble would backfire when the jury would return a guilty verdict. Circuit Court Judge Linda Coleman would then hand down a life sentence, meaning Stevenson will not be eligible for parole until he is in his early 50s.
“He is a survivor. He won’t let nothing get him down,” Annette said.
And in their lone conversation since his conviction, she said her son’s message was simple.
“He said, ‘They gave me life, but whatever don’t kill me, gonna make me stronger.’ He said, ‘Ya’ll stop all that crying, keep your head up,’” she said. “That’s the last we heard from him.”
Annette hopes her tale is one other parents can learn from.
Her only son now sits, on suicide watch, in a prison cell at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl. She hopes he’s eventually sent to the State Penitentiary in Parchman, where he’ll be closer for family visits.
And she’ll continue to visit and support her son.
For the one thing that remains is her love for her child.
“That’s still your child. Good or bad,” she said. “If you’re the mom, or the father, and you’re still on this earth, you need to be behind your child. 100 percent. Good or bad. That’s still your child.”
