Monique Jennings was 12 years old when her mother was attacked in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, on November 5, 1993. She is 45 now, and she is still the person making sure her mother’s account stays in the record.
Mary “Evon” Jennings Fleetwood was a mother of four who played softball and loved Oreos. Her daughter remembers her as quiet and petite. Stacey “Sabur” Tyler was sentenced to death in November 1995, and in 1997 the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld both the conviction and the sentence.
What changed is not the case. It is who is telling it. Making an Exoneree, a project that began at Georgetown University in 2018 and has contributed to the exoneration or release of 10 people, made a film arguing that Tyler is innocent. Kim Kardashian promoted it to her followers in June 2026. Supporters of the film wrote that Tyler had spent decades on death row for something he did not do.
“I want my mama’s side to be told,” Jennings said. “Because even though she couldn’t say much, she had a side. Her voice did matter.”
She is precise about what she is arguing. “I’d rather see a guilty man walk than an innocent man incarcerated,” she said. “This man isn’t innocent. He’s guilty.”
Her brothers say it in their own words. Darius, 48, went to the house. “We went over there. She was burnt up pretty bad,” he said. Jermaine, 44, was 11 at the time. “He don’t want forgiveness,” he said of Tyler. “He wants it to be forgotten. No, man, that’s my mama.” A fourth sibling, Anthony, died in 2016.
Making an Exoneree has said its films reflect its own assessment of the evidence and not a lack of compassion for victims or their families, and that wrongful conviction cases can involve overlapping and enduring harms.
The timing is not incidental. North Carolina has not carried out an execution since a moratorium began in 2006, and in October 2025 Gov. Josh Stein signed a law that could revive the death penalty in the state. A case decided in 1995 is live again, in public, on a platform Evon Fleetwood never had.
Jennings had closed this once. “It’s a chapter that I wanted to close and just never have to think about again,” she said. She opened it back up anyway, because of who is left to do it. “She’s not here to fight for herself,” she said. “So I have to.”
