Brenda Parker prepares for DeSherlia hearing

The Florida Parole Commission announced to local Historic City News reporters that at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, December 5, they will once again consider whether or not 67-year-old Thomas Edward DeSherlia should be granted parole on his life sentence; but Brenda Parker says absolutely not.

DeSherlia, who will turn 68-years-old on December 19, began serving a life sentence after his April 1975 conviction of the murder of Parker’s husband; St Augustine Beach Deputy Marshal Ron Parker. DeSherlia killed Parker in the line of duty at the Sheraton Inn on the night of January 12, 1975.

“I have attended these proceedings every five years since 1998,” Brenda Parker, who now lives in Gray, Georgia, told Historic City News. She will return again Wednesday, saying, “Failure on my part would result in this vile person being released back upon our society to kill innocent people, again and again as he has done in Alabama and Florida.”

If you are planning to attend the meeting of parole, conditional release, conditional medical release, addiction recovery and control release inmate cases, to which all persons are invited, it will be held at the offices of the Florida Parole Commission located at 4070 Esplanade Way in Tallahassee.

Parker returns for an annual memorial ceremony at the public park named for her late husband in St Augustine Beach; a town where the young couple began, and tragically ended, their lives together.

Regardless the outcome of the Tallahassee hearing, there is no possibility DeSherlia will leave custody — he has detainer orders filed by the Alabama Department of Corrections in Montgomery where he faces additional murder charges.

“He murdered two security guards in Alabama and robbed a bank in Iowa before his flight to Florida,” Parker said. “Who knows what unaccounted devastation was left in his path.”

DeSherlia spends his days in close custody at the Union Correctional Institution located in Raiford. He will not be transported to Tallahassee for Wednesday’s hearing. DeSherlia was already interviewed by the Florida Parole Commission and the commissioners have familiarized themselves with the circumstances surrounding his crimes. They will listen to public comments and see correspondence on the case Wednesday — even though DeSherlia won’t be there to hear or see them.

After Wednesday’s hearing is concluded, it is expected that DeSherlia’s next parole hearing will not be until August 2019. “If I still have life in my body, I will be there,” Parker’s widow told Historic City News.