She Watched Him Kill Her Mother. The DA Let Him Out First.
About this episode
The episode tells the harrowing story of Divina Leal, a woman whose life was marked by domestic violence and systemic failures leading to the murder of her mother.
She was fifteen years old when her stepfather assaulted her. She reported it. She gave up his illegal guns. She documented his death threats in a police report. And the Clark County District Attorney's office let him walk out of custody three days later.Eleven days after that, Leonard Woods stabbed Josie Kate Jones sixteen times in a Walgreens parking lot while her daughter watched.In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls, we tell the story of Divina Leal, a Las Vegas woman whose life became a masterclass in surviving the unsurvivable. Her story is not just about one murder. It is about what happens when a domestic violence system fails a Black woman who did everything right, reported everything, documented everything, and still could not outrun the consequences of a paperwork error made by a public official who is still in office today.We trace Divina's full story from a childhood built on love and chaos in equal measure, through the assault, through the murder of her mother Josie Kate Jones, through the compounded grief of losses that kept arriving before the last one finished breaking her, all the way to Indianapolis in 2024, where the man she had finally allowed herself to…
People in this episode
Host: John Reedburg
Topics covered
- domestic violence
- true crime
- system failure
- Black women's stories
- survival
- grief
Keywords
- domestic violence
- true crime
- Black women
- systemic failure
- survival
- grief
- Las Vegas
- murder
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Clark County District Attorney's office
Places: Las Vegas, Indianapolis
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