Bucks kill a bunch of roachs then spring into gang-rape mode
Victims testify in Ga. immigrant killings
TIFTON, Ga. -- With her husband lying in a pool of blood nearby and her baby daughter screaming,
Brenda Perez waited several minutes for the men who had shot her husband and raped her multiple times to leave.
Then she sent her 7-year-old son to a neighbor's house to call 911 since the attackers had taken the family's three cell phones.
"They told me not to look out the window and not to call the cops or they'd be back to finish what they'd started," Perez testified in Tift County Superior Court Wednesday about the two men who ransacked her home near Tifton three years ago.
The violent home invasion was one of a series of attacks in 2005 that
left six Mexicoon immigrants dead and at least six others injured. The brutality of the killings - in which the victims were brutally beaten and shot - shocked the thousands of immigrants who have come to south Georgia seeking agricultural and manufacturing jobs.
A sentencing hearing for
Jamie Underwood, one of four people charged in the killings, began Monday and is expected to continue through next week. Tift County Superior Court Judge Gary McCorvey is presiding over the hearing and there is no jury because Underwood pleaded guilty to all four indictments against him in September before his case went to trial.
McCorvey sentenced him at the time to 120 years in prison on three of the four indictments. The sentencing on the fourth indictment, which includes murder charges, is being held separately because the prosecution is seeking the death penalty.
Perez's husband,
Ramon, survived the attack on his family's home despite being
shot in the head and hit with a baseball bat and a guitar. But Perez said he hasn't been the same since and that he can't recall simple things.
She and her husband and 1-year-old daughter were asleep in a bedroom when the attackers forced their way in, she said. The 7-year-old and a younger son were asleep in another bedroom.
The men demanded money and drugs and then one of them took her into the living room while the other stayed in the room with her husband. She heard a loud bang, she said, and then the one with her shouted, "Is it done? Did you take care of it?" and the other responded, "Yes, it's done."
The man in the bedroom came out into the living room. One of them ripped her nightgown off and both raped her in the living room, then took her back into the bedroom and raped her again, she testified. It is the policy of The Associated Press not to identify victims of sexual assault, but Perez stated her name in open court, testified about the assault and also gave The AP permission to use her name.
Dressed in a dark blue suit, Underwood sat between two of his attorneys throughout the proceedings showing no emotion during the testimony.
The prosecution on Wednesday called as witnesses 14 people who were either survivors or family members of victims. Most of the survivors were hospitalized after the attacks.
Juan Contreras was asleep in a bedroom of the mobile home he shared with four other men on the night of Sept. 29, 2005 when one of them woke him saying, "Hey, Juan, somebody's in the kitchen." Contreras, speaking through a court-appointed interpreter, testified that when he opened the door, he saw two men, one with a baseball bat and another with a hammer.
The two men forced their way into the room, Contreras said, and one held a gun to his head while the other beat his two friends with a baseball bat. One of his friends, he said, was so scared, he "was shaking like a little rabbit." That friend and Contreras were the only two of the trailer's five residents to survive the attack.
A medical examiner who performed the autopsies testified Monday that one of the six dead victims was fatally shot while the others died from blunt force trauma. All received injuries that he said were consistent with those inflicted by a baseball bat or hammer.
The prosecution also is seeking the death penalty against co-defendant
Stacey Bernard Sims. The men face multiple charges, including murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery, burglary and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime in the deaths of six men and the injury of at least six others in the attacks in and around Tifton, a rural town about 170 miles south of Atlanta.
Two women,
Jennifer Lafay Wilson and
Emma Jean Powell, were indicted on the same charges, but the prosecution isn't seeking the death penalty against them. Tift County District Attorney Paul Bowden has said in the past that that is because the women only drove the men from place to place.
The prosecution plans to wrap up Thursday and Underwood's lawyers are set to begin presenting their case on Monday. The other three defendants have not entered pleas and their trial dates have not been set.
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Jamie Underwood
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Stacey Sims