By Michael Copley, Staff Writer
mcopley@powhatantoday.com

Eva Pegram Clarke, Ms. Eva to most people, is a slight woman with a big voice and penetrating eyes. She is 83 years old and was born in Powhatan; and, roughly four years ago, Ms. Eva was robbed and victimized by someone she didn’t know well, but who, being family, she thought she should trust.

It started with a phone call. Syvonz Robinson-Brown called her grandmother in 2004 and told her she needed help. Her family- her husband and three children- needed a place to stay. So Ms. Eva opened her home to family.

That’s how it started. The retelling started with tears.

“I didn’t know her, really, until she called saying she needed help,” said Ms. Eva, “I only knew she was my grandchild. I thought it was what the lord wanted me to do.”

The family moved in. Syvonz and her husband slept in Ms. Eva’s bedroom and the children shared the bedroom across the hall. Ms. Eva slept on the couch.

She said it was “so nice” at first; Syvonz helped pay the bills.

And then Ms. Eva transferred her power of attorney to her granddaughter.

Syvonz emptied Ms. Eva’s bank account and used money intended for food to buy a TV and other electronics, fur coats and concert tickets. 

Syvonz cancelled Ms. Eva’s life insurance and transferred her grandmother’s health insurance to her own family. She threatened Ms. Eva and wouldn’t let her answer the door or the telephone. Syvonz left her with what amounted to “a sandwich a day,” and the telephone and electrical bills went unpaid.

And then Syvonz and her family were gone. They “packed up and moved to Richmond,” said Ms. Eva, and returned to Powhatan to pick up clothes from the house they had taken over; and still Ms. Eva was threatened into silence.

Ms. Eva talked about a neighbor who brought food to the house one day. She said she answered the door because she was hungry, and then “put the food under the couch, so Syvonz wouldn’t know anyone had been there — in my own house,” Ms. Eva said with imploring eyes.

The nightmare, at least the living through it, stopped almost as suddenly as it began. Ms. Eva had been alone in the house for days, Ann Reynolds, the Sheriff’s Office crime analyst, guessed 10, but Ms. Eva can’t remember. She was without food, water, electricity or a telephone when an employee with the insurance company knocked on her door. And for whatever reason, Ms. Eva answered.

“I can’t tell you what I was thinking,” Ms. Eva said when asked about that stretch of time.

She was taken to the Sheriff’s Office after the insurance company representative saw the woman in front of her and looked inside the house.

“This house was so nasty. My mattress was like a pig sty,” said Ms. Eva. “My carpets were pig sties. If that woman from the insurance company hadn’t come, I guess I would have stayed there.”

Ms. Eva said she was 40 pounds under weight when she got to the Sheriff’s Office, “But we fattened her right back up,” Ann Reynolds said, cutting in over her friend.

Ann Reynolds and Ms. Eva laugh and hold each others hands, and they tell me about the entire watermelon Ms. Eva ate that day, the muffins and all the rest.

Syvonz was convicted on two counts of felony embezzlement in 2007 and sentenced to 20 years in prison on both charges, with 15 years suspended on both sentences, all time to run concurrent: Syvonz is serving five years.

But Ms. Eva said she still doesn’t understand the sentence; how, after all that, Syvonz only has five years to serve.

After her ordeal, the Sheriff’s Office drove Ms. Eva to her sister’s house, where she lived while her house was restored by members of the Sheriff’s Office, their families and others in the community.

Ms. Eva is in the same house today. Last week she sat at her kitchen table and talked, and in that conversation, Ms. Eva showed her strength. She is a lady who can laugh and cry in the same breath. “I’m a decent woman,” she said, without a trace of a smile on her face.

But behind that grit are hideous memories and a sad confusion.

“I don’t know why they did it to me, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “It has to be the devil. I didn’t know a grandchild would do that. It doesn’t make sense,” she said again, “you can’t trust your own people.”