Marissalynn Grace Taylor was a 9-year-old girl from West Green who died in Fitzgerald, Georgia, on January 26, 2017. Her obituary described her as a student at Fitzgerald Elementary School and the daughter of Daniel Taylor and Jennifer Grace Spires Taylor, and initially said she died suddenly following a brief illness. Later reporting linked her death to the killing of her mother, Jennifer Taylor, and said both were shot and found in a yard near the 400 block of West Orange Street, not far from Fitzgerald High School.

Those later accounts identify Veartis Tyrone Wallace as Jennifer Taylor’s boyfriend at the time and as the suspect; they report police arrested him the next morning after searching for him and that he was located hiding at a relative’s apartment at Pine Point Apartments on Perry House Road.

The contrast between the family’s tender public remembrances and the violence later attached to the deaths is stark. If anyone knew Marissalynn or has information about the events on January 26, 2017, please share what you know.