'Justice Needs To Be Served': Tremblay Family Responds To Accused Child Killer's Mistrial

SALEM, MA — The family of Melissa Ann Tremblay is calling for a retrial after a jury came back deadlocked in the murder trial of a 76-year-old Alabama man accused of killing the 11-year-old in 1988.

Marvin McClendon Jr., a former Massachusetts corrections officer, was charged in the Salem NH girl's killing this past spring, 34 years after Tremblay was found between two freight trains in the Boston & Maine Rail Yard in Lawrence with her left leg severed under one of those trains.

She had last been seen in the neighborhood of a Lawrence social club where her mother was on the Sept. 12, 1988 night when she went missing.

McClendon was arrested in Berman, Alabama in April after Essex County prosecutors said DNA evidence tied him to Tremblay's death.

McClendon pled not guilty to the first-degree murder charge in June.

"As Missy's family, we feel it is important to address the media now that the trial has ended," the family said on Friday in a statement released through the Essex DA's Office. "While we would have preferred a guilty verdict we thank God that it wasn't not guilty and that this isn't the end."

The DA's Office said on Thursday that it intends to retry the case.

"Someone asked why retrial is so important and honestly it is because justice needs to be served," the family said. "He has had 35 years that he has gone unpunished, walking free for 33 of those years. He has lived his life with his family, including his children and stepchildren but yet my aunt spent the rest of her life without her child and our family has been missing a part of us for 35 years.

"Missy would be 46 years old and probably have a family of her own if he hadn't taken her life. I don't know what possesses someone to do what he did to Missy."

Authorities at the time there were signs of a struggle before Tremblay's death.

The DA's Office said McClendon lived in Chelmsford worked for the Massachusetts Department of Corrections on three separate occasions between 1970 and 2002 and that he was doing carpentry work in the Lawrence area at the time of the girl's killing.

"Did she interrupt something he was doing and she became a threat to his life and his chance to go back to the Dept. of Corrections or did he just prey on an innocent young girl?" the family statement said.

"I guess we will never know why and that will always haunt us."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)