Convicted killer campaigns against gun violence

INDIANAPOLIS — Ramona Johnson and FOX59/CBS4’s Russ McQuaid first met in 1993.

They got reacquainted on Sunday.

“How far do you and I go back?” McQuaid asked.

“Oh, my goodness, well, way way back,” she said. “You were my arch nemesis once upon a time and then became one of my biggest advocates for me.”

“I was the same guy all the way through,” McQuaid answered. “Maybe it was you that was changing.”

“Maybe it was,” Ramona smiled, caught off guard by the answer. “Yes, yes, that could be so.”

Late on a summer night in 1993, Ramona Johnson was the manager of a Taco Bell on North Keystone Avenue when an argument broke out in her drive-thru lane between two customers as one complained that the other’s car stereo was too loud and he couldn’t order his food.

Ramona Johnson retrieved her gun and told an employee to rush outside and give it to Darnell Johnson, no relation, so he could fatally shoot Jerry Emmert, the father of a four-year-old girl.

The Johnsons were arrested, tried and convicted. Ramona got 35 years in prison. Darnell got 40 years.

Emmert’s daughter got a lifetime sentence of visiting her father’s gravesite.

Ramona told me she is haunted to this day by the tragic decision she made and understands that no penalty will be enough to satisfy her victim’s family.

”Even though I’m home, the punishment will always be here,” she said. “I will never be able to be free from that night.”

So Johnson has spent the last two decades trying to stop her kind of gun violence that ruined so many lives 32 years ago.

She got a Master’s Degree in social work, counseled gun violence victims in hospital emergency rooms and has developed a 20-week campaign for next summer she calls “Trauma Season” to work with government and non-profit groups to coordinate a program to stem firearms violence, especially among Indianapolis youth.

”I think that it’s important that the cycle that our kids are in now, even when they are coming out in incarceration, it’s important that they see someone like me that have gone through so much and they’re able to make changes, too,” she said. ”Gun violence kills. It destroys communities and we’re just thankful that there are people in our community that are willing to help fight this epidemic.”

Johnson took the pulpit at LifeJourney Church on Sunday to address the congregation and talk about her book, “I’m Living Proof.”

“People deserve a second chance at some point in time,” she said. “Now for me, prison was my saving grace. I’m thankful that I went only because I needed to find out who I was.”

A year ago, there were more than 24,000 people incarcerated in Indiana prisons.

In 2024, 11,000 offenders were released back into the community after serving their sentences.

Johnson said when it comes to combating violence, ex-felons like herself, locked up for committing violent acts on their fellow Hoosiers, ought to be a valuable resource for understanding and addressing dangerous crime.

“People who are getting out of prison and who have been in for any type of violence or gun violence should be the ones we should be talking to and going into prison,” she said, pointing to a chart outlining her plan to engage community organizations in her ‘Trauma Season’ campaign. ”This is the front line. These are the organizations in the city that are doing the groundwork and are the foot soldiers of the city.”

A judge who was familiar with Johnson’s case attended her address on Sunday morning. She spends every day on the bench sentencing convicted offenders to prison with the hope that they will figure it out and emerge someday to commit to not prey on their neighbors anymore. While she didn’t want to go on camera, she told me that Ramona’s turnaround encourages her to hope for the best as she tells those criminals standing before her after the guilty verdict is returned, “You can come back from this.”