Her son was killed and her lawyer asked for leniency. Gastonia officials said no
Gaston County prosecutors refused to delay their prosecution of a Gastonia woman whose 7-year-old son was killed by a car after she let him walk home without adult supervision.
This left her no choice but to plead guilty to a felony, her attorney said.
The case of Jessica Ivey and her husband, Samuele Jenkins, has captured national attention and ignited debates about parental responsibility for harm their children could face while walking or playing outside. A North Carolina state senator is calling for a new law to ensure parents aren’t arrested in such situations.
Public defender Matt Hawkins, who represented Ivey, 30, revealed new details in the case to The Charlotte Observer.
If prosecutors had granted Hawkins’ request for deferred prosecution, they would’ve agreed to drop Ivey’s charges once she completed certain requirements — likely community service and one-and-a-half years’ worth of supervision by a probation officer, he said.
Hawkins believes this refusal to defer Ivey’s prosecution, coupled with the $150,000 bond he said Ivey had no way of posting, left her with just one option: pleading guilty to child neglect, a mid-level felony.
“The most important thing for me is being out of jail,” Hawkins said, recalling Ivey’s words when he told her she’d been denied deferred prosecution. “I can’t have visitation with my kids while I’m in jail. I can’t help my other family members to grieve while I’m in jail. I can’t grieve properly while I’m in jail. If I don’t have a realistic chance of posting this $150,000 bond, then I don’t know what else to do other than to accept this plea, because it guarantees me getting out of jail.”
Gaston County District Attorney Travis Page did not respond to a message from The Charlotte Observer asking why the state’s prosecutors did not grant Ivey deferred prosecution.
Child’s death prompted arrests
In late May, Ivey was shopping at a Gastonia Food Lion with her 7-year-old son, Legend, and his 10-year-old brother. The boys asked her if they could walk the two blocks home to their father without her help. Though initially reluctant, Ivey relented when Jenkins, 31, promised to stay on the phone with the elder boy during the walk.
The boys never made it back to the house. Legend stepped into the street, despite his brother’s cry for him to stop, and was hit by a Jeep Cherokee. He died later that night at Levine Children’s Hospital in Charlotte.
Gastonia police arrested Ivey and Jenkins two days after Legend’s death. The Jeep’s driver, a 76-year-old woman, did not face any charges. Ivey and Jenkins did not respond to texts and phone calls requesting comment for this story.
Since the couple had been charged with child neglect, prosecutors set their bond at $1.5 million so Gaston County’s social services department could rehouse their six surviving children, said Hawkins and Charles Lifford, Jenkins’ attorney. After the children were placed in the custody of their relatives, prosecutors lowered the bond to $150,000.
Still, Hawkins called the high bond “outrageous,” especially since Ivey had just one past conviction: resisting a public officer in 2021.
Jenkins, on the other hand, had a host of prior convictions, the most recent of which were assault with a deadly weapon and violating a domestic violence protective order in 2022, according to the Gaston County Superior Court clerk’s office. Lifford said that Jenkins’ previous felony convictions put him at the risk of “a huge amount” of prison time.
So, Ivey and Jenkins pleaded guilty in June to felony child neglect charges. Ivey entered an Alford plea, which meant she maintained her innocence despite agreeing to be sentenced as if she were guilty.
As part of the couple’s plea deal, prosecutors dropped the more severe involuntary manslaughter felony charges and spared them prison time. Instead, Jenkins and Ivey were sentenced to 36 and 30 months of probation, respectively.
In a statement about the case to Newsweek, Page said the couple hadn’t deserved prison time for their role in Legend’s death. This was why prosecutors “quickly worked to find a resolution that would hopefully allow them to work under supervision with social services and ensure a similar tragedy doesn’t happen again.”
A spokesperson for Gaston County declined to share the status of the couple’s social services case as revealing case details is prohibited by state law.
Page also told Newsweek that the court system serves as “a way of connecting people in need to the services that might benefit them and change their lives.”
Hawkins said he isn’t so sure.
“There was this other, less restrictive alternative to accomplish the same thing,” he said, referring to his request for deferred prosecution for Ivey. “We offered it. You rejected it. Why?”
This story was originally published August 13, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
