Twenty-five minutes. That's all it took for a jury to find a local father and a former Jacksonville teacher guilty of beating his 4-year-old daughter to death.
It’s been more than a year since Jada Norfleet died. Prosecutors say she was beaten to death for refusing to eat her chicken nuggets.
John Norfleet showed no emotion when the verdict was read.
A jury of 12 found him guilty on all three charges of first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child and aggravated child abuse.
Jada Norfleet was killed in January 2015. Police say her dad and stepmother, Shavonn Norfleet, beat her repeatedly with a plank of wood until she went into cardiac arrest.
His defense team tried to use the insanity plea, stating he wasn’t himself during the incident. We spoke with Norfleet’s family and friends about the insanity plea and the guilty verdict.
“He’s had a lot of other issues that happened in his life, that they never explained about and I think it attributed to a lot of the mental issues that he had after a while. When I heard the verdict, even though we wanted to hear otherwise, I knew it was going to happen and it hurt for reality to hit, at this point,” said family member Rondell Hooker.
Norfleet wrote a letter to the court, declaring his love for his wife and their daughter. Part of that letter says, "We both loved Jada dearly, as we do our remaining daughters … It is absolutely senseless and outrageous to believe that either of us intentionally abused and/or murdered our daughter."
Norfleet will be back in court for sentencing on April 4.