Digital Paper Test 3 6-17-14 issuu.com rndigitaltest docs digital_paper_test_1__6-17-14.pdf Jun. 2014 Volume 100 | Page 11

The News
reporters, knowing the other twin
sister, Jasmiyah, had yet to face
trial or a conclusion in her legal
matters. .
“It wasn’t the best day but it
wasn’t the worst day,” said Frazier. “I’m just happy God opened a
window and threw a blessing out.
It’s a very hard day.”
Robert Head, Nikki’s trucker
boyfriend and owner of the house
where Nikki lived and ultimately
died, said he had hoped for a plea
deal for the twins.
“They got caught up in a bad situation that shouldn’t have been,”
he said.
He blamed Frazier for being
the source of the tension. “It was
all about the money,” he said, referring to income tax refunds that
Frazier was unable to claim after
the girls came to live with Nikki.
Head also denied ever seeing Nikki strike the girls.
“I should have told her to let
them go. (Nikki) was thinking of
letting them go and letting them
come back on their own.”

The crime
“I think to understand this case,
you have to understand the background,” District Attorney Read
told the court.
He described the twins becoming increasingly disorderly as their
mother and great-grandmother,
Della Frazier, traded custody of
them. And Nikki herself became
more erratic as tensions mounted
between her and Frazier.
Well-behaved and getting good
grades early in life, the girls ran
into problems around age 13,
when Nikki moved them away
from Frazier to Conyers, where
Nikki shared a house on Bridle
Ridge Court with Head. Nikki
believed the girls were sexually
active and using marijuana, among
other problems.
“The girls, on the other hand,
were resentful of their mother’s
attitude to them,” Read said, especially because she drank and used
marijuana herself.
At one point, one of the twins
claimed to have been raped, and
Nikki did not believe her, Read
said.
Meanwhile, Frazier criticized
Nikki’s lifestyle, while Nikki saw
Frazier as interfering with raising
her children for “financially motivated” reasons.
On June 28, 2008, Nikki called
Conyers police, accusing the twins
of attacking her. Minutes after officers calmed the situation down,
Nikki ran out of the house to their
police car, saying the girls attacked
her again.
Officers saw that Nikki “had
scratches and she had red marks
she had not had three minutes
before,” Read said. They found
marks on the girls as well.
Police arrested the twins, and a

Saturday, January 1, 2014 • 11
Juvenile Court judge ruled them
“ungovernable.” He placed them
in Frazier’s custody and ordered
the whole family to counseling.
But the family’s problems continued. At one point, Read said,
Nikki was found in contempt of
court for cursing at Frazier and the
twins.
“Living with the great-grandmother has simply swapped one
set of problems for another,” Read
said.
In late 2009, the twins were back
in Juvenile Court for truancy and
running away from home. A judge
placed them back in Nikki’s custody.
The decision “caused chaos in
the hallway of juvenile court,”
Read said. Jasmiyah was the most
upset and “said in the presence of
the victim [Nikki]…‘If I have to
go live with you again, I’m going
to kill you.’”
“During the next eight days,
the drama continued,” Read said.
The girls misbehaved during the
process of unenrolling them from
their former school. Then Nikki
misbehaved while enrolling them
in Rockdale High.
Conyers police were called to
the home twice in that time. One
time, Nikki called, saying Tasmiyah had thrown a bag of food. The
next day, Tasmiyah called saying
that a dispute between her and an
aunt led to a “pushing match” at a
welcome-home party for the twins.
Then, on the afternoon of Jan.
13, 2010, Tasmiyah ran from the
house and approached a Rockdale
County Sheriff’s Office deputy
who happened to be nearby. She
told the deputy her mother was
dead.
Nikki’s body lay in a bathtub,
with multiple s tab wounds. Many
were shallow, but there were deep
wounds penetrating both lungs, the
jugular vein and the spinal cord. A
medical examiner later ruled the
wounds were all “survivable” only
if Nikki had been treated immediately.
The twins, crying and upset, told
police they came from school and
found their mother dead. The night
before, Nikki argued on the phone
with another boyfriend, and was so
intoxicated the twins had to help
her into bed, they said. That morning, they claimed, they missed the
school bus but were unable to get
any response from behind their
mother’s locked bedroom door.
“They continued to deny any
knowledge of their mother’s
death,” Read said.
But Conyers police noticed that
both twins had scratches, cuts and
bite marks on their arms and fingers. The girls had various explanations for the wounds. Tasmiyah
at one point claimed that “when
she became stressed, she would
bite herself,” Read said.
Meanwhile, the medical examiner noted that there was no forced

Submitted photos/The News

(Top) A confrontation between Nikki
Whitehead and family members over
custody of the girls.
(Bottom left) Jasmiyah and Tasmiyah Whitehead in happier times.
(Bottom right) Nikki Whitehead was
a fashion student at Bauder College
with dreams of being a “stylist for the
stars.”