‘She mothered me.’ Judy Williams consoled families of Charlotte murder victims, dies at 69
Before vigils for Charlotte’s murder victims became common, the circles of faces bathed in candlelight and tears, a young woman was found strangled to death in February 1993.
Serial killer Henry Louis Wallace was later sentenced to die for killing Shawna Hawk and eight other women, but at the time Hawk’s mother wasn’t sure she could outlive her own agony. Twenty-seven years later, Dee Sumpter said Monday, “there are days that I miss Shawna so much that I can barely breathe.”
In her grief, Sumpter had turned to Judy Williams, a friend since childhood and Shawna’s godmother.
“Judy lashed herself onto what we had to do,” Sumpter said. “I remember the day, maybe two weeks later, sitting in Judy’s living room, crying. She said, ‘Did you try to find help?’
“I said, ‘Judy, there is no help. Nothing that attends to these ills.’ From that conversation, MOM-O was born.”
The group they created, Mothers of Murdered Offspring, would console the survivors of shared pain while demanding a stop to the violence. It has not lacked for work. A record 129 people were killed in Charlotte in drug-fueled 1993, but the 107 homicides last year was the most in more than a decade.
On Saturday, the group lost its driving force of recent years. Williams, 69, died at her Charlotte home after fighting lung cancer for three years.
For 27 years, MOM-O has honored victims and their families with vigils at murder scenes, memorial services, balloon releases and countless funerals. The group has been nationally recognized and its work replicated elsewhere.
“It’s hard to accept an award for something you like doing,” Williams told The Observer in 2010, when she was a finalist for a national honor, the Citizen Service Above Self Honors award of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. “I feel like it’s something God called me to.”
Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden credits Williams’ deep connection to her west Charlotte community with helping him crack the first murder case he worked alone as a city homicide detective in 1991.
That case began a relationship, McFadden said, in which Williams helped bridge differences between police and the community and persuaded officials to increase staffing to solve homicides.
“Judy Williams is the most consistent community leader that this city has ever had,” McFadden said. “Day in, day out, late or early, she was going to be there. There will never be anyone like her.”
An ‘old soul’
Williams and Sumpter grew up together and were godmothers to each other’s children. Even as a girl, the eldest daughter of eight siblings growing up poor in Charlotte’s Brooklyn neighborhood, Williams was a nurturer, Sumpter said.
“She was always just dependable and what you would call an old soul,” Sumpter said. “She knew to do things that most children would not.”
In creating MOM-O, Sumpter remembered the structure and honesty of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings that friends had visited.
“When they walk into our circle, we grieve briefly,” she said. “And then we recycle that grief into positivity and we take back that into the community and let that serve as a deterrent to future murders. I refuse to sit idly by and let the blood of our precious children run freely through the streets of Charlotte.”
By the time Williams became the group’s point person, 10 years after its founding, Sumpter said she was emotionally spent after attending more than 500 funerals for murder victims. But she said she and others will continue its work.
Even as she neared death, Williams continued her practice of creating unique tokens of murder victims — their names and pictures etched into buttons, lapel ribbons or T-shirts — that she knew families would treasure for years.
“Those little items, you would have thought someone had put a pot of gold at their feet,” Sumpter said.
‘It was genuine love’
When Genicia Hairston’s grandmother was killed in 2009 and then her sister in 2016, her grief became too much to carry alone.
While her parents grieved together, Hairston turned to alcohol — until Williams saved her life, she said.
“Miss Judy caught wind of that, and she had a conversation with me,” she said. “She told me that self-medicating will not bring my grandmother or sister back, and that God gave me a voice to sing.”
“I need you to get help,” Williams said at the time. “Allow me to help you.”
Williams took Hairston under her wing, and Hairston became involved with MOM-O, singing for families at vigils, stepping up when Williams became sick, and now serving as the organization’s memorial coordinator.
Hairston said Williams was like a mother to her when she needed it most, offering her words of advice and sharing Bible scriptures with her.
“It was genuine love. I was in need of it,” Hairston said. “I will forever be grateful to her for saving my life. She mothered me, nurtured me, scolded me, and disciplined me. She saw something in me that at the time, I was too deep in grief to see myself.”
Hairston said Williams gave until her last breath, and that the organization will continue that legacy of dedication to the community. MOM-O hosted a service on the same day as Williams’ death. Though it was difficult, Hairston said, “It’s our duty to keep that strength and love going.”
“Miss Judy was the most selfless woman I have ever met. I don’t think people understand a heart that big, how much of a gift and jewel and blessing she was to so many,” Hairston said. “She was just one of those types of women that you would have been blessed to meet, and if you didn’t meet her, you must hear about her story.”
A mother to all
Community activist Kass Ottley, who leads the advocacy group Seeking Justice CLT, is used to being “the organizer” — leading events, wrangling people together, and bringing supplies.
But the first time she hosted an event with Williams, she didn’t have to do anything but “bring the crowd.”
“She wouldn’t let me do anything,” Ottley said. “That’s the type of person she was.”
Ottley said though Williams’ organization was integral in the 1990s when it started, it’s just as essential now.
“Black life isn’t valued the same as white life, and that’s just the way it is. That’s not really changed,” Ottley said. “So her work in the community, you can’t even put a value on that. It’s that valuable to our community.”
Ottley said Charlotte’s homicide rate is often dwindled down to just numbers, but each of those numbers represent a life, and most often, a Black or brown life.
“These people matter, and their families matter,” she said. “These are people who are forever gone, and it affects everybody, not just one person. I think she really understood that.”
Williams’ work can’t be quantified, Ottley said. The impact she had on Charlotte was so huge, Ottley said, that no one can fill her shoes. She estimates Williams has helped at least 1,000 families since 1993.
“She is that mother of unconditional love,” Ottley said. “That mother that comes out and hugs you and holds you and talks you through it and doesn’t judge you and doesn’t try to diminish what you’re going through.”
And now, Ottley believes it’s going to take the entire community to try and continue her work.
“We owe Miss Judy that much,” she said. “I’m glad she’s no longer suffering and I know she’s in heaven. There’s no doubt about that.”
Respect for ‘Miss Judy’
McFadden suspects many community residents probably never knew Williams’ last name — only as “Miss Judy,” who was to be respected at all times. Despite tension, violence never broke out at any of the many vigils McFadden has attended (although one ended early after a wayward candle lit a woman’s hair on fire).
At Thanksgiving dinners, MOM-O feeds the families of homicide victims and the detectives who tried to find justice for them.
“You cry, you laugh, but that’s the true love, and Miss Judy was part of that,” McFadden said. “If we do nothing else, we cannot let that go wrong. Everything else we can fail, but we cannot let the candlelight vigils and the Thanksgiving dinners go.”
David Howard, a former Charlotte City Council member and the third MOM-O founder, said his mother earned her property management credentials because she wanted to be home for him and his three siblings. Williams worked as manager at Kingspark Apartments for 44 years and died in her unit beside the complex’s office.
“She was the absolute best mother in the world,” Howard said. “What’s amazing to me is all the people who tell me they talked to her for hours and hours. And she talked to me for hours, so when did she sleep?”
His mother’s ambition had been to become a lawyer. Last year, Howard said, the Mecklenburg County clerk of court’s office named her an honorary magistrate, prompting friends to call her “Judge Judy.”
Long active in her church, Berean Seventh Day Adventist, Williams switched gears once MOM-O was founded. “She found a ministry in it,” he said.
Memorial services, still being planned, are expected to be held at her church, Howard said. Vigils by MOM-O and Kingspark Apartments are also planned, he said. Hairston said donations can be made to MOM-O in her honor.
