JACKSON COUNTY -- A Jackson County grand jury has indicted an Ocean Springs man on a murder charge in the 2010 beating and stabbing death of his mother.
John Reed Armstrong, 48, is tentatively set to go to trial next week in the killing of Joan McCorkindale Armstrong at her Ocean Springs condominium.
The 80-year-old Armstrong had served as a volunteer at Ocean Springs Hospital, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, The Lord is My Help soup kitchen and Art Who. She also provided volunteer home care for invalids and served as a lay Eucharist at St. John’s Episcopal Church of Ocean Springs.
Police took the younger Armstrong, who suffers from a mental illness, into custody shortly after friends called to say they’d stopped by Joan Armstrong’s home at Gulf Oaks Condominiums on Front Beach and her son answered the door covered in blood in the early evening hours of Aug. 7, 2010.
Police said Joan Armstrong had been beaten in the head with a brick and stabbed. She was dead at the scene when police arrived there.
Police had gone to Armstrong’s home earlier the same day in response to another 911 report, and Joan Armstrong told police her son was schizophrenic and hadn’t taken his medicine in about a month. She said he was claiming someone had stolen his clothes from his backpack, though no one had.
Joan Armstrong intervened earlier in the day, reports showed, telling police her son always claimed his clothes had been stolen when he came to stay with her. Police asked Armstrong if she wanted them to call paramedics to take her son to the hospital, reports said, but she told them she would take him to the hospital.
But that never happened.
As the officers were leaving, they said John Armstrong walked outside once more and showed them two empty backpacks. His mother reiterated, the police report said, he always did this.
When police returned later in the day, they found Joan Armstrong dead inside her condominium.
Murder is a felony punishable by a maximum sentence of life.
