Children take stand in mother’s murder in La Crosse

Some of the five children witnessed their father stab mom three times

All five children were in the apartment on March 6.

Two of them, both 11 years old, were on the stand Monday, describing the horror of watching their father stab and kill their mother at a Fifth Ave. apartment in La Crosse.

The jury watched a cellphone video the 29-year-old mother, Jessica Joyner, captured. Her husband, Haron, asks, “Ready? Ready?” before yelling some expletives and stabbing his wife in the neck three times with a knife he took off the kitchen table. 

“It stopped for a couple of minutes but then they started again,” one of the 11-year-old children said in a taped interview with police. “Then my dad grabbed her arm, stabbed her in the neck. All the blood was spraying everywhere.”

Mom escaped to an apartment next door with her four of her five children, then collapsed in a pool of blood with them around her, while Haron ran off. Police arrested him in another part of La Crosse.

The other child, in a taped interview with police, when asked if she went to the neighbor’s apartment said, “No. I stayed in my room because I didn’t want to get stabbed.”

Two children were on the stand Monday. Three of the children recorded taped testimony seen by the jury.

The defense argued that the stabbing was reckless homicide and not planned ahead of time. Haron is charged with first-degree intentional homicide.

The Joyner trial could wrap up today.