Ashley Henley.Photo: Dan Eubanks
Ashley Henley was known as a bulldog, a tenacious and hard-working member of the Mississippi State House of Representatives. Detail-oriented, the lifelong educator, 40, had no problem ruffling feathers.
“She would ask any question of anyone,” says her friend, Rep. Dana Criswell, who served with Henley until she lost her 2020 reelection campaign. “She just hit it head-on and would ask the question and say exactly what she thought. She only weighed 90 pounds but once she latched onto something, she wasn’t going to let go.”
So when her sister-in-law, Michelle Jones, was found dead inside her burned trailer home in Water Valley, Miss., in December, Henley was determined to find out what happened, even putting up a large wooden sign with pictures of Michelle at the site of her death with the words, “I WAS MURDERED.”
After Jones' manner of death was listed as “undetermined” and cause of death as “unknown,” Henley wrote on Facebook in May, “I will leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth.”
By late May, Criswell says Henley told him that she was on the trail of something big.
“I don’t know what she found,” Criswell says in this week’s issue of PEOPLE. “Her words to me were, ‘They may try to kill me, but they’re not going to stop me.’ So, she knew that she was finding something that was very, very bad.”
Michelle Jones and Ashley Henley.Courtesy Brandon Henley
Just over two weeks later, on June 13, while doing yard work outside the burned-out trailer, Henley was killed with a gunshot wound to the head.
“It was an assassination basically,” says Henley’s friend and former colleague, Rep. Dan Eubanks. “She was rattling chains and cages and I think that somebody didn’t like the fact that she was doing that. She didn’t back down, and she wasn’t intimidated, and if she wanted to see justice for somebody she got in there and got in the trenches.”
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Five days after Henley died, authorities arrested her sister-in-law’s neighbor, Billy Brooks, 42, and charged him with arson in connection with the fire at her home. Brooks has not entered a plea and remains jailed.
Billy Brooks.Yalobusha County Sheriff Department
Brooks' wife, Melissa, says her husband had nothing to do with the arson.
“I know that my husband is innocent of this,” she says. “You cannot convince me I’ve spent 15 years with someone that is capable of burning someone up in their house. He’s not capable of this.”
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“She always felt like she had to fight for the underdogs,” he says. “She saw her sister-in-law as an underdog, somebody that didn’t have a voice, and she was going to fight for her and make sure that she had justice. That’s what she died doing.”
source: people.com
