"It just really hit home because they were my age." --Caroline Carr, juror for Reinaldo Rivera's death penalty trial. Rob Carr/Staff

Juror will never forget experience

When they called her name as the 12th juror for Reinaldo Rivera's death penalty trial, "My heart just fell through the bottom of the floor," Caroline Carr said Thursday.

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She wondered in the beginning how she, a 22-year-old, could make a decision on whether a man would serve life in prison or die. But after two weeks of listening to the horrifying details of Mr. Rivera's murderous rapes, after Mr. Rivera was found guilty of killing Army Sgt. Marni Glista, Miss Carr knew death was the only fitting punishment, she said.

"The thing that struck me was when he turned and looked at us and said, 'If you let me out I'll do it again,'" Miss Carr said of Mr. Rivera's testimony last month. It was that and Mr. Rivera's statement that he still fantasizes about hurting the young women he killed that convinced her she could never vote for a punishment that held the slightest chance Mr. Rivera could be free again, she said.

The faces of Sgt. Glista, 21, Melissa Dingess, 17, Tiffaney Wilson, 17, Tabitha Bosdell, 17, and the only survivor, Chrisilee Barton, "will be forever in my mind," Miss Carr said.

The Richmond County Superior Court jury that Miss Carr served on had to reach a decision on only one murder, Sgt. Glista's. Other jurors will be asked to determine Mr. Rivera's guilt or innocence in the deaths of Ms. Bosdell in Columbia County and Mrs. Dingess and Mrs. Wilson in Aiken County. But the jury still heard evidence in their slayings to determine whether it proved Mr. Rivera's frame of mind in Sgt. Glista's murder.

"It just really hit home because they were my age," Miss Carr said of the victims. "The worst I think was Marni and seeing the pictures of Tiffaney Wilson.

"It could have been me. They were just in the wrong pl ace at the wrong time," Miss Carr said. While Mr. Rivera insisted he lured his victims into believing he would pay them to take modeling photographs and they went willingly with him, Miss Carr said she has doubts about that.

"Do I think all of his confession is true - no, especially Marni," she said, pointing out that Sgt. Glista was a trained soldier and Mrs. Wilson had just given birth.

She's still thinking about "what if" and what is really the truth about what happened to the young women who died. She thinks about it every time she passes the Huddle House on Washington Road, the last place Ms. Bosdell's family saw her alive.

Miss Carr said she has driven out to the Georgia Welcome Center where Mrs. Wilson's baby was found the night she disappeared, and thought of the man who testified he saw a woman in distress that night with a man right behind her. She knows he must punish himself with "what if" and "if only" thinking the pair he glanced at were Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Rivera.

What the victims went through can still make her cry at times. What she heard and saw during the trial still causes her to lose sleep and maintain a constant vigil on personal safety.

Mr. Rivera deserves credit for confessing, she said.

Miss Carr feels sympathy for his family, especially for his children. In the jury room Jan. 26 as jurors debated his punishment, his children were the reason cited most often in arguments supporting a life sentence, she said.

"But Tiffaney Wilson had a daughter and she will never remember her mother," Miss Carr said.

In the end, the jurors agreed that death was a suitable punishment and it was what Mr. Rivera wanted, she said.

"It was grueling," she said of the final deliberations on punishment. "I don't think I'll ever forget Monday (the day of final deliberations). I don't think I'll forget any of it."

--From the Friday, February 13, 2004 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle