Olivia Moody, 21, from Chicago graduated from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. Six days later she went to jail to begin a 30-year prison sentence for second-degree murder.
Life changed in an instant for the honor student who worked her way out of Chicago’s crime-ridden Roseland neighborhood to become the first in her immediate family to graduate from college.
In May, less than a week after she received a degree in criminal justice from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a jury convicted her of killing a 21-year-old mother of two after a senseless altercation over a young man.
Moody claims that she had been bullied by a group of women from the neighborhood and that the shooting was self-defense. The jury decided it was second-degree murder.
Now the young woman born to a prostitute and crack addict who abandoned her at the hospital after birth, a young woman who believed that education would be her ticket “out of the ghetto,” is serving a 30-year sentence in an Arkansas prison.
