Woman Who Spent 17 Years in Prison After Being Wrongfully Convicted of Murder Dies in House Fire

An American woman who spent almost two decades in prison for murders she did not commit has died after a fire broke out in her home in Ireland.

Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs, 78, and Kevin Kelly were found dead on Tuesday, June 3, after her cottage caught fire in a village in County Galway, the Garda, the local police force, said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. Kelly was her caretaker, according to her nonprofit, The Sunny Center Foundation.

Emergency responders arrived after they received an alert about the fire at 6:19 a.m. local time and found both people dead at the scene. An investigation is ongoing, and the bodies were taken to University Hospital Galway’s mortuary, police added.

“The results of the postmortems, along with the findings of the technical examination, will determine the course of the Garda investigation,” the department said.

The Chief Fire Officer of Galway Fire and Rescue Services did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s requests for comment.

The deadly fire is a heartbreaking ending to a life besieged by challenges.

In 1976, Jacobs was a 28-year-old mother of two young children when she and her boyfriend, Jesse Tafero, decided to catch a ride with Tafero’s acquaintance, Walter Rhodes, in Florida, The Guardian reported.

During the car ride, Rhodes fatally shot two police officers and blamed the murders on Jacobs and Tafero, who were both sentenced to death, according to the outlet.

While Tafero died after a botched execution in 1990, Jacobs, the mother of his child, spent five of her 17 years in prison on death row, the paper reported. Jacobs was freed after an appeal court resulted in a new trial, and she accepted a plea deal in 1992, according to The Irish Times. After the murders, Rhodes admitted to shooting the officers, although he later retracted his confession, The Guardian reported.

Jacobs wasn’t the only one to suffer. Her children, 10-month-old daughter Christina, nine-year-old son Eric, were in the car that life-altering day in 1976. After her arrest, they were raised by Jacobs’ parents until the latter died in a plane crash, according to the paper.

Despite her family’s trauma, Jacobs was determined to live a life of positivity. She built a platform campaigning against the death penalty.

“It was very important, that choice I made to heal, rather than to spend the gift of a new life that I had looking backwards at the wrongs that were done to me,” Jacobs told the Times in 2006. “And I was able to share that with my children. It meant I am leaving them a legacy of hope and strength rather than defeat and pain.”

In 2012, she married Irishman Peter Pringle, whom she had met in 1998 while making an appearance at an Amnesty International event, the paper reported. They bonded over their shared history. Pringle, who died in 2023, was acquitted of the murder of two police officers during a robbery in County Roscommon in 1980, the Times reported.

Jacobs’ story was captured in her 2008 memoir, Stolen Time, and films, including an international play, The Exonerated, which was adapted into a movie starring Susan Sarandon.

She and her late husband created the nonprofit to support other people who have been wrongfully convicted.