Twenty-nine years of court dates and parole hearings have come down to this: Judy Sugar Bloom stands at the back of an ornate courtroom in Snow Hill, stunned and nearly speechless. He isn?t leaving prison today, the man who killed her father.
Or, as the judge said, the man who, in fact, didn?t.
It?s something of a Dickensian tale, the 1977 robbery of St. John?s Jewelers in Ellicott City and the decades of struggle ? legal, logical and deeply private ? that have entangled these families ever since. Bernard Sugar was the 53-year-old store owner taken hostage and fatally shot that day; William Jackson is one of two men serving life sentences for his murder; Judy Sugar Bloom is the daughter who went to court this month hoping for closure, expecting to see Jackson released.
But in this story there are only more layers.
“How do you pay your debt to society?” Ruby Taylor, Jackson?s sister, said, walking through Snow Hill after Jackson was ordered back to prison for six more years. “It?s never going to end for him, because someone died. … [But] we might die. Do you leave thisto your children, and your grandchildren?”
Looking back through the lens of an internal police report and volumes of court records, the shooting happened like this: Jackson and James Wells took Bernard Sugar and a co-worker hostage during the robbery and escaped police clutches using a succession of available patrol cars. They led a chase that ended at a roadblock in Baltimore County. Officers unloaded a hail of bullets on the car; Sugar was shot in the neck by a Howard County police officer.
It was the top news for weeks, with reporters sorting through the police response. Somewhere in the middle of the story, the Sugars said goodbye to their father.
“There are times in a guy?s life where something happens, and the only person you can call and tell is your father. I haven?t had that,” said Mark Sugar, who was 23 at the time. But, he added, in a monumental trade-off, on the day “that my father passed away, I did inherit two other people.?”
Convicted of first-degree murder because Sugar was their hostage, Jackson and Wells went to prison and the media moved on. But for years, Judy Sugar Bloom said, their family was fractured by the robbery. Adulthood set in, and everyone seemed to absorb Bernard Sugar?s loss in a different way.
Life in prison took on real meaning, too: Jackson at first worried terribly that his parents would die before he got out, Taylor said. And then they did.
“He never thought that he would have to pay that high a price,” Taylor said. A nephew went from a stroller to marriage while Jackson was away, she said, and Jackson changed enormously, too.
Sugar Bloom kept abreast of Jackson?s growth, attending the parole hearings as Jackson wrote a book, took classes and dedicated himself to God.
She drove to Snow Hill, where the case was originally heard, again this month both opposed to his early release and, quietly, hoping Jackson could gohome to his own long-suffering family. All she wanted was to ask if her father spoke during the robbery; in the absence of ever understanding rationally why everything went so wrong that day, Sugar Bloom said she needed to hear every detail.
“[Jackson] said no, [her father] never said anything, not a word. But you knew [her father] was scared. You could tell from the look on his face that he was scared,” she said.
Jackson isn?t home for Thanksgiving this year, as his family had hoped. He and Sugar Bloom and their families will wait for a new chance at closure. In the meantime, Sugar Bloom said she?ll shelve the epic memory as best she can.
“Enough already,” she said recently. After nearly 30 years, “let it rest.”
