The police interview
“I did it, OK? I killed all of them,” a shackled, shirtless Jackson confessed the next morning to Detective Stuart Carter in a room at police headquarters.
“I did it. I did it. I killed them all,” he repeated, softly. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
It was 3:48 a.m., about seven hours after Jackson was arrested, and 14 hours after the homicides likely occurred.
Police could not question him earlier because he was incoherent, having downed whole bottles of over-the-counter painkillers such as ibuprofen and Advil PM, trying to kill himself.
The first police recordings at 11:22 p.m. show him alone in the interview room, wearing only blue shorts, with shackles on his wrists and ankles. Wild-eyed and staring, he strains against his restraints, sniffling and shaking his head to clear it.
Before he killed Jerrica and their children, he may have ingested heroin, for which he used the street name “fatboy,” according to a cousin who gave him a ride that day.
When investigators started questioning him about 3 a.m., Jackson gave vague answers, claiming Jerrica left that day with a friend, and he didn’t know where she went with the kids.
Asked about cuts and scrapes on his neck and chest, he claimed they came from mosquito bites he had scratched, before telling detectives he had been “playing rough with my baby’s mama.”
He continued to dodge questions from Detectives Matt Sitler and Dexter Wysinger, until Carter came in and told him four dead bodies were in his apartment, and asked what led to that.
“Arguments,” Jackson said.
What did she say that made him angry?
“Just be talking about me,” he said. “She tell me she got her a new dude…. She started arguing with me in the kids’ room.”
Only when Carter kept asking where he got the knife did Jackson finally admit he came home from work after 2 p.m., and got into a fight with Jerrica. Each of them grabbed knives before he took hers away and started stabbing her, he said.
“She was fighting back,” he said. “I just kept doing it until she stopped fighting back…. After I stabbed her the first time, I just kept going.”