A man in his 60s is now charged in the decades-old killings of a Charlotte mother and her 10-year-old son, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said Friday.
With the help of multiple labs and agencies, authorities could connect James Pratt, 62, to the incident, investigators said. Law enforcement then arrested Pratt at a hotel in York County, South Carolina.
Pratt was 22 when he killed 27-year-old Sarah Hall and her 10-year-old son, Derrick Mobley, CMPD said. Officers found them dead in their home on March 14, 1984, in what is now known as the North Tryon Division.
Officials got in touch with Hall's family about the arrest, and in a video produced by CMPD, Hall's sister says the arrest brings her a sense of closure.
She says she worked nearby to where Hall was killed at the time of her death, and her voice breaks and strains with emotion as she describes how she wished she could have been with her sister.
"I'm just grateful that the police have found this person, and I hope he spends the rest of his days behind bars," Mary Dae said.
Dae talks about the girls' upbringing some in the video also, and says the siblings' mother died when they were young, and the pair was raised by their grandmother. She said Hall acted as her mom in a lot of ways.
People liked her," Dae said in the video. "She had an outgoing personality."
In the video, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Johnny Jennings talks about how he came to feel a connection to the victims in the 1990s when he began looking at the case. A DNA expert also details the lab's process on how they helped police find a suspect in the case.
Watch CMPD’s video detailing their cold case investigation below.