Tasmiyah Whitehead left Pulaski State Prison on August 5, 2026, at age 33, after more than sixteen years in custody for the killing of her mother, Jarmecca “Nikki” Whitehead, in a Conyers, Georgia, home on January 13, 2010. Georgia Department of Corrections records list her maximum possible release date as May 19, 2040, meaning she will remain under parole supervision for more than a decade. Her identical twin, Jasmiyah Whitehead, is still confined at the Metro Transitional Center in Atlanta and is not scheduled for parole consideration until March 2028, even though both sisters accepted the same 2014 plea that reduced murder charges to voluntary manslaughter plus knife possession and making false statements to authorities.

Each received a 30-year package: twenty years for manslaughter stacked with two five-year terms. Both became eligible for parole in 2017 after pretrial jail time; the board kept Tasmiyah inside another nine years before finding a “reasonable probability” she would remain law-abiding. The twins were sixteen when the fight began after they overslept for school. What started as an argument over lateness and household rules escalated into a struggle in which Nikki was struck with a pot or vase, bitten, choked with a childhood medallion, and stabbed dozens of times—accounts range from fifty to eighty wounds—including injuries that pierced both lungs, the jugular vein, and the spinal cord.

The sisters then placed her body in the bathtub, went to school, and later flagged a Rockdale County deputy, claiming they had come home and found her ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. Investigators described the bathroom as one of the bloodiest scenes they had ever seen. Four months pᴀssed before arrests in May 2010. The girls first presented themselves as shocked victims; journals, timeline gaps, a bite mark matched to Nikki’s teeth, and hair found between the mother’s teeth unraveled that story. In taped confessions tied to the plea, they described a fight that one sister said was “until somebody dies.” Nikki, a 34-year-old beautician and single mother, had recently taken the twins back after earlier placements because relatives and officials considered them too violent to manage. Grandmother Lynda Whitehead later told the court her daughter had been “stabbed 50 to 60 times and was brutally killed.” The case became nationally known as the “Twisted Twins” story, later revisited in television documentaries.

Tasmiyah’s release does not erase the sentence; it converts the remaining years into supervised freedom. Jasmiyah remains inside a facility designed to prepare selected inmates for work, counseling, and eventual return. The board’s split decision—one sister out, one still waiting—has reopened questions about how two teenagers who had been honor-roll students and Girl Scouts ended a morning argument with their mother’s body in a tub, then spent years insisting they had only discovered the crime.

Source: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16123453/Twisted-twins-Tasmiyah-Whitehead-released-parole-mother-stabbed-sister.html