At about three in the morning on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, Tonya Thomas, thirty-three, sent a text message from her house at 7245 Bright Avenue in Port St. John, Florida, near Cape Canaveral, asking that her mother be told what had happened and saying she wanted to be cremated with her children. A sheriff's lieutenant, Tod Goodyear, said afterward that it showed the killings were premeditated. She lived there with her four children: Pebbles Johnson, seventeen; Jaxs Johnson, fifteen; Jazzlyn Johnson, thirteen; and Joel Johnson, twelve.
About ninety minutes later she began shooting. Three of the children got out and ran to the house next door, one of them bleeding, and banged on the door saying their mother had shot them. The neighbors, a husband and wife woken in the dark, called 911. "I knew this was going to happen," the wife told the dispatcher. She said she had heard one child say the youngest had shot their mother, and then that the children told her husband it was their mother shooting at them. "Get back, you're not coming in our house," she can be heard saying. Her husband told the dispatcher he was armed but did not know who had the gun and was not going to put himself in danger; when he did go out, he saw a child bleeding at the front door.
Days later the husband issued a statement through an Orlando television station disputing how the recording had been reported. The children had not been refused entry, he said: they were scattered outside in total darkness, he was outside trying to help them, and the words "you can't come in" were meant for whoever they thought the gunman was. The children and their mother had always come to them when they needed help. He and his wife, he said, had received death threats.
Thomas came out of her house and called for her children to come home. "From what the neighbors said, she was very calm," Goodyear said. "She walked out and called them back. They turned around and walked back to the house." She fired the fatal shots at about ten minutes to five, smoked a cigarette, and later shot herself. Deputies found Jaxs, Jazzlyn and Joel dead inside and Pebbles in the front yard. The medical examiner recorded nineteen gunshot wounds in all, including her own, from a Taurus .38-caliber revolver that holds five or six rounds, so she reloaded. One child was shot seven times; the youngest was shot five times from more than two feet away; the gun was fired against the chest of at least two of them.
The weeks before had been hard. Dispatch records showed deputies at the house on three successive days in April: on Easter Sunday she reported that Jaxs had thrown a bicycle through a window, and the next day that he had kicked and punched her when she tried to wake him for school. He was arrested for battery on her, and when he was released from juvenile detention she did not pick him up, wanting, she said, to teach him a lesson. That brought a Department of Children and Families investigator to the house. She told the investigator that Jaxs had anger problems and that the family had been going to counseling now and then. The investigator talked to neighbors and school staff, watched the children at home, found no sign of distress, and heard each child say they felt safe. She called Thomas on May 10 to ask whether she needed anything, and Thomas said no. A supervisor closed the case on May 13, two days before the shootings.
The files released afterward also recorded a long history of domestic violence. In 2000 the children watched their father, Joe Johnson, shout at Thomas for not making dinner and then punch and kick her into a wall; they were removed from the home for a month and returned over the department's objections. The papers noted that Thomas had herself been abused or neglected as a child. Johnson lived elsewhere in Brevard County, and Goodyear said he was very distraught at the news.
No motive was established. Unless she had left a note or told someone, Goodyear said, she may have taken it to the grave. The department's spokeswoman, Carrie Hoeppner, said the files offered a glimpse inside the home but did not appear to contain the answer to why it had happened. These were the worst homicides in Brevard County since 1987. The thirteen-year-old's name appears as both Jazzlyn and Jazlin in the reporting.