Thread: South Georgia attacks leave 6 dead

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/12788920.htm

Posted on Sat, Oct. 01, 2005


South Georgia attacks leave 5 dead

By Russ Bynum
ASSOCIATED PRESS

TIFTON - Five men were killed and at least six other people were wounded in what appeared to be a string of robberies targeting Hispanic immigrants at trailer parks in and around the city early Friday, authorities said.

The victims were attacked with handguns and an aluminum baseball bat found at one of the crime scenes, said Vernon Keenan, director of the GBI.

Police were looking for two black men in the attacks. "We believe the same two suspects committed all four home invasions," Keenan added.

All the dead were immigrants from Mexico, and all but one belonged to the same family, said Francisco Dominguez, who says his uncle and a cousin were killed in their trailer on the outskirts of town.

The attacks took place in southern Georgia, about 100 miles south of Macon. Three of the attacks were in Tift County - two within Tifton's city limits - and one in neighboring Colquitt County.

"We think they're tied together," Colquitt County sheriff's Capt. Hal Suber said.

Among the injured, two were in critical condition and three others were serious, Keenan said.

Efrain Navarro, 25, said he was a roommate of one of the men killed and one who was seriously injured. He said he was sleeping about 1:30 a.m. when he heard loud groans, as if someone was hurt.

"I didn't see the suspects. I heard somebody moaning, that woke me up," he said.

Navarro said he ran to a neighbor's trailer about 100 yards from his home, trying to get help. "I was knocking on their door when I heard the shots - two shots," he said.

He said it was too dark to see anything, but he saw an outline of one his roommates lying on the floor. After he heard the gunshots, he hid inside his truck until daylight.

In the morning, Navarro said, he went to Pedro Vargas' home.

Vargas, 29, found the bodies and called police. He said the police told him one of the victims was shot behind his ear.

About 5 p.m. Friday, Johnny Goddard boarded up the windows and door of a tan single-wide trailer in a Tifton trailer park off Ferry Lake Road.

A white sedan parked next to the trailer was covered in plastic, and two wooden chairs rested in the dirt beneath the trees.

Two of the victims were killed in the trailer, authorities said.

Goddard knew why he did his job - to secure the crime scene from potential interlopers - but he said he had not been told what had caused it.

"Undoubtedly it was something fierce," said Goddard, who normally performs basic maintenance jobs at the trailer park.

A home health-care nurse who worked with some of the trailer park's residents stopped by the yellow tape that marked the perimeter of the crime scene to see what had happened.

"Crime has picked up in this area, but there ain't too much you can do after it happens," said Ramona Wood, clutching her young daughter.

Standing in her yard across the dirt drive from the trailer, Amanda Gomez said she woke up Friday morning to police milling about the scene.

"It scares you to wake up and see people dead next door," she said.

She recalled helping take some of the victims' family around to job sites to help them find work.

"These people stayed to themselves, I don't know why somebody would have killed them," she said.

Gilbert Boyette, who owns the park and many of the trailers in it, said there had been robberies in the neighborhood before but these were the first slayings.

Still, discovering that there had been victims at other parks, as well, made him feel more confident that his own had not been singled out for violent activity.

"That shows that it could have been done anywhere," he said.

Across town, in the Town & Country Mobile Homes, law enforcement officials worked into the evening at another of the crime scenes. A gray trailer was marked with plastic cones, and GBI investigators questioned residents driving into the park.

At Town & Country, the two bodies were found by a 14-year-old boy - one behind a trash can and the other out in the open. The boy, who lives in a trailer next door, first saw the bodies from his living room window then ventured outside to get a closer look.

Neighbors said they didn't hear any gunshots or noticed a struggle during the night.

One woman who lives in the mobile park was so terrified that she refused to give her name. Sitting in a plastic chair holding her six-month-old son, the woman said the community isn't secure, pointing out a missing front door knob on one home.

She just hopes that the suspects are found before anyone else is harmed.

"We're afraid to sleep at night because they might return," she said. "We want justice done. ... We don't want them to think nothing will happen so they return and commit more crimes."

Isabel Martinez, who lives in a nearby trailer park and sells jewelry to residents of Town & Country, blamed the violence on gangs.

Law enforcement has been too lax on younger members of the community, she said.

"Now, we're scared of our teenagers," she said.

In the Colquitt County attack, a man was shot in the head and beaten with a baseball bat, and his wife was hit in the mouth, Suber said. The man was in stable condition at a hospital in Thomasville. The woman has been released, Colquitt County Sheriff Al Whittington said.

Whittington stressed the attacks didn't appear to be hate crimes. Instead, he believes they may be linked to other robberies of immigrants in the past two weeks, including some in neighboring Cook County to the east. "I don't think it has anything to do with race or hate," Whittington said.

Hispanics in the area fear otherwise, said the Rev. Alfonso Gutierrez of Our Divine Saviour Church, the only Catholic church in Tifton.

"There is a lot of fear because people wonder up to what point it could be a race question," Gutierrez said. "It's a vulnerable community."

Many immigrants are undocumented and therefore can't open bank accounts, which means they tend to carry a lot of cash or keep it in their homes. They are also afraid to call the police when threatened - even in these killings, those who found the bodies hesitated to call 911, Gutierrez said.

Tift and Colquitt counties are home to at least 14,000 immigrants from Mexico and Central America who work on cotton and peanut farms, said Luz Marti, a volunteer with Gutierrez' church. Census data indicates that Hispanics make up at least 11 percent of Colquitt County's population and at least 8 percent of Tift County's residents.

"They're panicking," Marti said, adding that lack of Spanish-language media beyond a small, bi-weekly two-page supplement to the Tifton Gazette makes the community especially jittery.

"The perpetrators were two unidentified black men". Now where have we heard that before? It sounds like more of an inside job. Most home invasion crimes are done by perpetrators the same ethnicity as the victims.

In this case it seems that they may have been right. As of today the suspects in this case have been Black Americans

www.ajc.com

3 charged in South Georgia slayings

By BILL TORPY
Published on: 10/05/05
TIFTON â€â€

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/pol ... 007831.htm

Posted on Mon, Jul. 10, 2006

Prosecutor seeks death penalty for two men in immigrant killings

GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO
Associated Press

ATLANTA - Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for two men charged with murdering six Mexican immigrants killed with guns and baseball bats during a string robberies at trailer parks in south Georgia last fall.

"There're a lot of different grounds, plus the nature of the crimes," Tift County District Attorney Paul Bowden said Monday.

Jamie Deamtrive Underwood and Stacey Bernard Sims were indicted for murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery, burglary and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime in the case of the deaths of six men and the injury of at least six others.

The multiple murders during armed robberies and burglary were listed as the statutory aggravating circumstances in the indictment seeking the death penalty, which a grand jury issued on May 30.

On Sept. 30, immigrant workers were targeted in at least four attacks in and around the small agricultural community of Tifton, about 170 miles south of Atlanta.

The brutal slayings - with the victims beaten, shot and, in at least one case, raped - shocked many of the thousands of Hispanic immigrants, especially the illegal ones, who have flocked to south Georgia to pick cotton, peaches, peanuts and cotton.

Two women, Jennifer Lafay Wilson and Emma Jean Powell, were indicted on the same charges as Underwood and Sims, but prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty against them, Bowden said.

"Their role basically was driving them from place to place," he said.

All four are from neighboring Moultrie and all four are black, stirring speculation that the attacks were racially motivated.

Police have said there is no evidence of that, and many criminals consider immigrants easy prey because they tend to carry large sums of cash, especially if they're undocumented and can't open bank accounts.

According to the indictment seeking the death penalty, Underwood and Sims killed the men "for the purpose of receiving money and cell phones having monetary value."

Killed were Mateo Pais Gomez, Florindo Mauricio Pais, Jose Luiz Paez, Guadalupe Sanchez Cabello and Felipe Mauricio Esparza, all hit with a baseball bat or similar object on the head. Armando Martinez Perez was shot to death with a handgun. Some of their roommates were assaulted and robbed but survived.