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Murder suspect gets 60 years in drug case

Ga. law prevents him from seeking parole

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

A Fayette man accused of stabbing his cousin to death was sentenced to 60 years in prison Thursday for selling cocaine twice to a confidential informant employed by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Department’s Drug Task Force.

Tommy Ingram, 49, of 128 Homers Place, Fayetteville, will have to serve the entire sentence without the possibility of parole because he has previously been convicted of three felony charges, said Assistant District Attorney Wesley Persons.

The jury deliberated Thursday afternoon for less than an hour before returning the guilty verdicts. After the verdicts, Superior Court Judge Christopher Edwards sentenced Ingram to serve two consecutive (back-to-back) 30 year prison sentences for both charges.

Ingram also faces a murder charge from the killing which will be handled in a separate case at a future date. Police say Ingram stabbed to death his cousin, Terry Durham, 44, as they fought over who was going to sleep in a room of the house where the killing occurred: on 133 Butler Road in the Kenwood Road area.

Thursday afternoon, jurors in the drug case against Ingram saw a video of the informant entering a house on Booker Avenue to make the buy. The transaction isn’t caught on the camera, but the informant testified that Ingram sold her two rocks of crack cocaine for $20, with her giving him the money and him pulling the contraband out of a jacket pocket.

Defense attorney Steve Smith pressed the informant, a woman, to recall which pocket he took the cocaine from. She testified that she couldn’t remember.

On cross-examination, Smith pointed the finger at other persons in the video, which was dark once indoors because of poor lighting. At one time, Smith saw a person in the background and asked if he was smoking a cigarette.

“That’s a crack pipe,” the informant testified.

In his closing, Smith also attacked the criminal record of the informant in an attempt to discredit her testimony, which was the heart of the state’s case.