In the summer of 2017, a heart-wrenching series of events unfolded, culminating in the tragic death of four-year-old Harper Adelyn Edens, a young female from Easley, South Carolina. On July 13, 2017, Harper, her nine-year-old brother Hayden King, and their mother, 36-year-old Jessica Edens, were found deceased inside a locked and running vehicle at the Greenville-Pickens Speedway in Easley.
The cause of their deaths was determined to be gun violence in what authorities swiftly identified as a murder-suicide.
The investigation into the devastating incident revealed a troubled background, stemming from a contentious custody dispute between Jessica Edens and her estranged husband, Benjamin Edens, over their daughter, Harper. Distraught over the marital separation and a recent family court hearing, Jessica Edens initiated a deadly sequence of actions. Before taking the lives of her children and her own, she drove to Greenville and fatally shot 28-year-old Meredith Leigh Rahme in the parking garage of her apartment complex. Jessica believed Rahme was romantically involved with her estranged husband. Authorities later clarified that the two were coworkers.
Following the shooting in Greenville, Jessica Edens drove with her two children, Harper and Hayden, who were in the vehicle at the time of the first shooting, to the speedway in Easley. There, she shot both of her children before turning the gun on herself. Law enforcement officials pieced together the timeline, concluding that Jessica Edens had planned the attack. The day before the shootings, she had stolen the. 40-caliber handgun used in all three killings from her parents' home.
In the wake of the tragedy, further details emerged, painting a picture of Jessica Edens's escalating desperation. In the weeks leading up to the incident, both Meredith Rahme and Benjamin Edens had contacted the police to report harassing messages and online posts from Jessica. In the final hours, she sent text messages to her estranged husband that foreshadowed the violence to come and made a final phone call to him after she had killed the children and just before she ended her own life. The investigation was officially closed, with Jessica Edens named as the sole perpetrator of the killings, leaving a community to mourn the senseless loss of two young children and a young woman. There were no arrests to be made, and the case did not proceed to a trial.
