Courtroom Jurors Create Donation Fund for Crime Victim

After a woman took advantage of a mentally challenged man, the courtroom jurors made her pay -- but they also reached into their own pockets to lend the victim a hand.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on April 12 2008

Johnny Bryant spent 30 years working at supermarkets in his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. Even though the mentally-challenged man was illiterate and couldn’t do math, he became very skilled at stocking the grocery stores’ shelves –and his years of hard work and careful saving added up to a lot of money: By 2002, the 58-year-old had saved more than $151,000 to put towards a well-earned retirement.

That year, when the Winn-Dixie store where Bryant worked shut down, he had to decide what to do with his life savings. Unfortunately, it seems he trusted the wrong person to help him make that decision: A local woman named Cynthia Sue Hardee convinced Bryant to invest his money into starting a business with her. Within months, Bryant’s bank account had nearly been wiped clean –according to court records, Hardee had stolen or misappropriated more than $75,000 of Bryant’s money.

When the case went to trial this year, Hardee was sentenced to five years in prison, and fined $10,000 for her abuse of Bryant’s bank account. Sadly, the courtroom couldn’t do much to help Bryant, who is now $40,000 in debt to the IRS for cashing his retirement plan early. But the case’s jurors made a surprising decision: They would help Bryant themselves by creating a donation fund for him. Most contributed the $166 fee they’d received for serving on the jury; some gave even more.

“If that was our brother or friend, we would hope someone would do it for us,” Crystal Jones, the jury forewoman, told The Star-Telegram. Jones herself has an autistic brother, and other members of the jury have relatives with disabilities and were moved by the case’s sad circumstances. “It was emotional for many of us.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 44 years of law practice,” said the case’s prosecutor, Joe Shannon, who contributed $250 of his own money to the fund. “They know that the guy has been wronged and they wanted to right it a little bit.”

If you’re interested in contributing to the fund, visit this page for details on how to donate.

Filed under: General Interest,

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