She was 17 when the crime happened in 2006 — a junior in high school who had just gotten her first job as a cashier at McDonald’s, her first bank account, her first serious boyfriend and her first car — and today when she enters the visitation room at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Hilltop Unit in Gatesville, she doesn’t look much older. She’s strikingly small, five feet, two inches, wearing black-framed glasses and a thin strip of eyeliner on her top lid.
