Daughter of woman, 62, savagely beaten: "They got a place in hell" for her killer

FOR AS LONG as Felicia Barley can remember, her mother was quick to open her home to anybody who needed a place to stay.

Even growing up in the Westpark Apartments public-housing development in Powelton, Barley said, she remembers her mom always offering to provide a roof over the heads of those less fortunate.

Now, Saundra Barley's kindness - and how it led to her horrific slaying last week - will dog her daughter forever.

"My mom was the kindest, most loving person you would ever meet. People took her kindness for granted, but you can't fault her for that," Barley, 39, said at her Parkside apartment last night. "I feel like I'm going to be haunted with it for the rest of my life."

The body of Barley's 62-year-old mother was found nude Thursday inside her home on 53rd Street near Arch in West Philadelphia. Police said she was brutally beaten and died of blunt-force trauma at the hands of Denise Taylor, 57, a woman whom Barley said her mother barely knew but took in earlier this year.

Taylor called police to the house herself about 3 o'clock that morning and concocted a story about how three men had broken into the home and brutally beaten the woman, whose body police have said was covered with bruises when she was found. Police - who said last week that Taylor had a history of inflicting violence on the older woman - didn't buy her story, though, and she was charged on Saturday with murder in Saundra Barley's killing.

Barley said she cannot bear the gut-wrenching details of how her mother died: She was beaten, her devastated daughter said, from morning to night on Wednesday with items including a baseball bat and an extension cord.

"My mom was beaten from 10 a.m. to 11 o'clock at night the day before her death, and she was screaming and hollering, and people heard," Barley said, getting choked up, as she held her 1-year-old son, Jeremiah, one of her mother's four grandchildren.

Taylor was being held without bail at Riverside Correctional Facility yesterday, according to court records. She is scheduled to appear for a preliminary hearing on Dec. 3.

Barley said she will face her mother's accused killer, whom she called "wicked and vindictive," in court.

"I plan [if] the Lord allows me to be at every court hearing," Barley said. "Right now, I don't have no mercy on this woman, because she had no mercy on my mom."

Barley said she suspected for months that Taylor was abusing her mother, but that she was helpless to get her mother away from the woman. She said she began to notice bruises on her mother's body about three months after Taylor moved into her house in March, but that both her mother and Taylor denied the abuse when confronted about it.

"I had a feeling something was going on by the marks, but she kept saying no abuse," Barley said.

In September, Barley said, she and other relatives contacted police after Taylor allegedly threw bleach on her mother in one incident. Her mother was advised then that she could obtain a restraining order and press charges to begin the process of evicting Taylor from the house, the daughter said, but she declined to do so.

"It totally sounded like she was brainwashed," Barley said.

Now, she said, Jeremiah and her mother's great-grandchildren will only know of Saundra Barley in the stories her relatives tell about what a kindhearted woman she was.

"That's the sad part about it, he's still too young to realize he'll never see his grandmother again," said Barley, who suffers from epilepsy and is struggling to afford her mother's burial.

The daughter at times when talking about her mother's horrific death stopped to pray, sharply gasping, "Oh, have mercy, Lord," and closing her eyes.

Saundra Barley will be buried Saturday at Merion Memorial Park in Bala Cynwyd after a viewing beginning at 8 a.m., followed by a 10 a.m. service at New Birthing Worship Center, on Spruce Street near 60th.

Donations can be made to her family by contacting New Birthing Worship Center's senior pastor, the Rev. Juanita Armstead, at the church: 215-476-3605.

If Saundra Barley's tragic story sounds familiar, that's because it is: In August, police said James Mears, an ex-con taken in by two kindly older women in Holmesburg - Dollie "Grandma" Evans, 67, and Ruby Thomas, 59 - fatally shot both women in a plot to steal $500 inside Evans' home on Vista Street near Torresdale Avenue.

As for Saundra Barley's cold-blooded killer, her daughter said, "They got a place in hell for [her]."