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In the memory, she is 8 years old, prettied up in barrettes and beads and new clothes, fly-girl fancy. She stands in the sunshine, preparing to step from a Knoxville sidewalk into a family friend’s car. Driver and passenger are about to road-trip from eastern Tennessee to South Florida.

Jameerial Johnson, now 24, wonders still how her little girl self would have looked in her father’s adoring eyes on that day more than 15 years ago.

“I just wanted him to see my hair. It was braided, with little curls hanging down the sides. I was going to the beach. And I wanted him to see me.”

He, though, was on the other side of the Cumberland Mountains. There was no way he could catch sight of her.

When her father, Almeer Nance, was 16, he was sentenced to a minimum of 51 years and, after that, another 25 years for abetting a robbery of a Knoxville Radio Shack and being an accomplice to the murder of store employee Joseph Ridings, 21. The shooter, then-19 ....

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