The woman accused of shooting a man after he rebuffed her panhandling request described herself as a Christian and said she felt bad about the shooting this morning during a jailhouse interview with The Bee.
"I didn't want to kill him," said Audrey Jackson, 47.
Looking haggard in her orange and white jumpsuit, Jackson yawned occasionally and often asked for questions to be repeated during the half-hour interview in a Sacramento Main Jail visiting room.
Jackson said she had just stepped off a Greyhound bus from Reno before the shooting. She said she had stayed at a shelter there but came to Sacramento after losing her bed.
After leaving the bus station, Jackson said she was searching for a payphone to call local shelters when she encountered Frank Perez. She gave a lengthy explanation about why she felt threatened by Perez, but the details she provided do not match police and witness accounts of what transpired at the bus stop Monday afternoon.
Authorities say Jackson approached Perez at a J Street bus stop, asked him for money and shot him once in the abdomen when he refused. He remains in critical condition at UC Davis Medical Center.
Jackson could not recall some specifics of her background, but said she was born in Chicago and raised on- and off-again in Indiana.
She said she spent time in a Sacramento shelter about a year ago, but at some point moved to an apartment in the Denver area and lived there five or six months before someone stole her rent money, forcing her to leave.
Jackson said she next went to Reno, though she could not remember when that was.
She said she has no family in the area. She has two grown daughters who, she said, graduated college and live in the Midwest.
"I raised them on my own so I had to do something good," Jackson said.
She said she has not been in recent contact with them.
"I'm trying to do this on my own," she said. "(My daughters) can't afford to give me a house. They got their own life."
Call The Bee's Kim Minugh, (916) 321-1038.
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