Earnest Griffin is seen in this photo with a nephew in 1984. Griffin died from a gunshot wound to the head on Nov. 12, 1984. Jay Thomas Burlison was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter on Thursday in Whitfield County Superior Court.

DALTON, Ga. — Eric Griffin said he spent time with his dad, Earnest Griffin, every day. 

On the night his father was fatally shot, the last words his father said to him were “If I don’t see you tonight, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Nearly 34 years later, Eric Griffin isn’t that 20-year-old kid who worked on cars with his dad or sat at his dinner table almost every night. Instead, he has grieved the loss of his father and been waiting for more than three decades to receive justice for his father’s death. 

Jay Thomas Burlison, 75, was found guilty on Thursday by a jury of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Earnest Griffin in Rocky Face in November of 1984. He had originally been charged with murder. He was also found guilty of aggravated assault for shooting his then-wife Mary Burlison — now Mary Mealer — four times the same night and another count of aggravated assault for pointing what turned out to be an empty gun at a convenience store clerk and trying to fire it. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday.

“I’m very satisfied,” Eric Griffin said after the verdicts were delivered in Superior Court Judge Scott Minter’s court Thursday morning. “It has been a long time coming and I am glad that it is over. 

“I put it behind me a long, long time ago,” he said. “Regardless of how this would have come out, it don’t bring Daddy back. I can’t imagine what we would have had through these other 34 years, but it is what it is. I am glad to see (Burlison) is going to serve his time. Other than that, I pray and I hope he finds Jesus.”

Griffin said he hasn’t spent his life dwelling on his father’s death or dedicated it to finding vengeance or a sense of justice in his father’s name. Instead, he said he had forgiven Jay Burlison years ago because of his father.  

“My daddy taught me forgiveness. My daddy taught me about Jesus,” Griffin said. “It is not for me to hold it in my heart and in my mind. If I hold it, I let him have my joy. He is not going to have my joy. If he had walked free, I would feel the same as I do right now, I truly would.”

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for more than five hours on Wednesday before being sent home by Minter shortly after 8 p.m. They returned to the courthouse Thursday morning and returned the verdicts after a little more than an hour of deliberations. 

During their deliberations on Wednesday, jurors had sent a note to the judge and were called back into the courtroom. They were told by Minter to return to the jury room and continue deliberations. The contents of the note were not read into the record, and neither District Attorney Bert Poston nor Assistant Public Defender Micah Gates would comment on the contents of the note. But Thursday morning before the jurors were allowed to resume deliberations, Gates asked Minter to direct the jury to consider acquittal after a juror had written of there being a “lack of evidence.”

“It is really frustrating that the jury acknowledged a lack of evidence,” Gates said. “The state has the burden of proof, so if there is a lack of evidence, then it is the jury’s duty to acquit. They did not acquit despite the lack of evidence, and that is very disappointing.”

Under Georgia law, voluntary manslaughter occurs when a life is taken and the person “acts solely as the result of a sudden, violent and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation sufficient to excite passion in a reasonable person …” Voluntary manslaughter has a sentencing guideline of from one to 20 years in prison. The two aggravated assault convictions carry sentences of from five to 20 years.

Burlison and Mary Mealer were separated and their divorce was expected to be finalized on Nov. 14, two days after Griffin was killed. Mealer and Griffin had begun a relationship. Griffin was killed and Mealer shot in the parking lot of the convenience store that Mealer managed in Rocky Face. Mealer testified Burlison pulled in behind their cars, hit Griffin in the head with a gun and shot him and then shot her through the driver’s side window, once in the chin and three times in the side and lower back. Burlison then chased her into the convenience store and “dry fired” his empty gun on cashier Ron Harris. 

Burlison had lived in Virginia and later in Tennessee since that night, never renewing government documents and admittedly living on cash. He was found by investigators earlier this year when family members applied for Social Security and Veterans Administration benefits for him because of his poor health. He was returned to Whitfield County in July.

Mealer said ever since she learned that Burlison had been found by authorities, it was like living 1984 over again each day.

“It is closure,” Mealer said of the verdicts. “I would say if you put it all together, from the time we first hit this courtroom the first day I seen him again until today, I would say I might have had 12 or 13 hours of good sleep. I believe I can go home and lay my head down tonight and really be thankful and be glad that it is over.”

Former Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office detective Glen Swinney was the senior detective in the original investigation and has been working with the district attorney’s office since 1991. Throughout the years, he had kept an eye on criminal databases across the country and looked for leads into the whereabouts of Burlison. Thursday’s verdict was especially satisfying for him. 

“It’s one that I thought I would go to my grave without ever having him caught,” Swinney said. “It was one of my better cases that I thought we had built, and it was like he just dropped off the face of the Earth. I kept that file on my desk from 1991 to now and it was just haunting me.”

The prosecution’s case was based on the testimony of Mealer and Harris. Harris testified in handcuffs and in prisoner garb since he is serving a sentence in Ohio after being convicted of raping a child. The vast majority of evidence in the case was lost during the transition of records to the new Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office complex. The only items entered into the court record in the trial from the original investigation were copies made by Swinney and kept in his personal files. 

A small amount of physical evidence, the fact that some of the people involved in the investigation had died and the amount of time that had passed presented a challenge for Poston.

“It was challenging from the beginning,” Poston said. “With the jail moving and some evidence was gone and some documents and photographs being gone, we don’t know all that we lost. Obviously, with the passage of time, witnesses’ memories begin to fade and it gets hard to remember the sequence of events, so just a tremendous challenge to prosecute a case this old. But we felt like we had a compelling case anyway, and we felt like we owed it to the family to put it in front of a jury — win, lose or draw — and felt like we needed to try to get justice for Earnest Griffin and his family.” 

“It is great to give this family some closure,” Poston said. “For Eric, especially, I am just very happy for him. They were obviously best friends, and all these years later to get justice for him is very gratifying.”