FORT WALTON BEACH — Doris Guthrie remembers being calm as she approached the front of the courtroom Thursday, where the man who beat her and her husband after breaking into their home last year waited to apologize.
Jonathan Edward Fennell, a 36-year-old Georgia man, pleaded no contest to home invasion robbery, aggravated battery on a victim over 65 years old, grand theft auto, and fleeing and attempting to elude officers. Okaloosa County Circuit Judge John Brown sentenced him to 30 years of prison.
“He was very nice, very pleasant,” Guthrie, who is 84, said of seeing Fennell in the courtroom. She wasn’t sure of the exact words he used to apologize, but she remembers her reaction.
“I thought it was very nice of him to make that effort,” she says. “I did not say that’s all right or anything.
“I wanted him to know he had stolen my future. That’s all I said to him.”
Fennell had done odd jobs for Doris and Paul Guthrie in the days before he forced his way into their home in Fort Walton Beach on March 22, 2012.
He beat both of them severely and tied them up before taking their money and driving away in their car. Police caught him that evening.
Paul Guthrie, who already was in poor health, never fully recovered, his wife said. He died three months later.
Doris has struggled with her own health problems as well as making decisions alone that she long had made with her husband.
But the resolution of Fennell’s case eased her mind, she said.
“I didn’t realize that I would feel so much relief, just to not have to worry about it anymore,” she said. “It was one of those things that was hanging there.”
She said 30 years seems like an appropriate sentence for Fennell, considering the damage he caused. But a day after the sentencing, she wished she would have had more time to talk to him.
She will always wonder why he chose her and Paul that night and why he kept beating her husband after he could no longer defend himself. And she wishes she could tell him that she feels badly about him spending most of the rest of his life in prison.
“I do wish I had let him know that I really and truly am sorry that he is going to be incarcerated for so long,” she said. “He was such a young man.
“It’s over and maybe he can make a life in prison. Perhaps he could learn to live a life that is beneficial to him.”
