Families try to share understanding as jury deliberates

Albert L. Perry Jr. hoped from his youngest days to be a police officer.

"His sister was always going to be a nurse, Albert the policeman," his mother said yesterday.

Zaundra Zaneta Gray could have been anything she wanted.

"She never had a challenge she didn't face and rise above," her father said yesterday. His daughter was "articulate, beautiful and well-traveled," he said.

The two families -- Grays and Perrys -- met yesterday under the worst of circumstances.

During a weeklong trial they sat on either side of a Chesterfield courtroom in stern, sad silence. The parents of Albert Perry, murder defendant, and of Zaundra Z. Gray-Stofel, his victim.

Yesterday, a day after a jury convicted Perry of first-degree murder, the panel was charged with recommending a sentence and the hearing before Circuit Judge Timothy J. Hauler drew from the two families each other's story of woeful loss.

When the testimony ended, overwhelmed with grief, the families managed polite understanding and gentle touches of mutual compassion for one another.

Even Perry, 27, guilty of strangling a woman he claimed a long-running relationship with, managed a fleeting smile when he spotted his 3-year-old daughter holding a gray doll.

He reached his hand toward her moments before a three-man, nine-woman jury rejected a prosecutor's plea for life in prison, recommending a sentence instead of 40 years.

Perry's life collapsed almost beyond help, his mother Marilyn Perry had told the jury. He'd lost a baby daughter at 5 months to complications from prematurity; then he succumbed to drug addiction.

"The baby died in his arms," said Marilyn Perry, a registered nurse who has devoted her professional life to helping the mentally ill and people with addictions.

Her son could never shake his drug habit, she said.

Albert Perry's father worked with disabled students in the Chesterfield County school system.

Gray-Stofel's life as an escort service prostitute was not known to her mother and father.

To them she had been a precocious, brilliant child who became an international flight attendant but had struggled through two failed marriages.

She had trouble channeling her intelligence toward a patterned life.

At 40, Zaundra Gray-Stofel, once married to a State Department lawyer stationed in Senegal, devoted her attention to her little daughter and was living with her mother.

She'd spend hours with her daughter playing tapes designed to boost intelligence and learning, Rena Gray told the jury.

Rena Gray sobbed recalling her excitement for the little girl Zoe's second birthday, Nov. 29, 2007.

The excitement shifted the next day to worry over Zaundra.

Zaundra had been out all night and had not returned for the birthday party Nov. 30.

"It was going to be an old-fashioned birthday," Rena Gray told the jury.

She said she believed her daughter's claims that she worked nights delivering food to night shift workers around town.

When her daughter was out, Rena slept beside Zoe, keeping her safe.

Shortly after 7 a.m. that Nov. 30 morning, Chesterfield police were already beginning what would be an intense, yearlong murder investigation.

Gray-Stofel's nearly nude body had turned up in a Chesterfield motel stairwell, her panty hose knotted around her neck and her face swollen from a beating. The skin was broken in tiny crescent marks from her fingernails where she'd fought to pull the ligature from her throat.

Perry's motel room was a few yards away.

Perry will be formally sentenced Nov. 4, but his lawyer said an appeal on a number of grounds is certain.

"My heart goes out to them; I can't imagine the pain they feel," Marilyn Perry told the jury, looking toward the Gray family yesterday. She said the man at the defendant's table is not the man portrayed at trial.

"What you see here is not what he really is. He was not raised that way," she said, adding that she hopes investigators will someday find the real killer.

Rena Gray recalled her son coming home to her the morning of the murder. He didn't have to say what had happened, Rena Gray told the jury.

"All I had to do was look into his face and I knew."

She spends much of her time now hoping for the return of Zaundra's daughter, in Africa with her father now, a child with whom she shared a bond that empowered them both through the tragedy.

"I spend the days thinking, crying, praying, hoping God will find a way to bring her back to me," she told the jury.

The panel left to deliberate and the two families gathered in the courtroom's center aisle, trying to share understanding.

Rena reached to touch the hair of Perry's 3-year-old daughter, the same age as Zaundra's Zoe.

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or .