Jerome Raines is going to prison for stealing trees by the truckload.

At his sentencing Thursday, a Lizella woman he ripped off stood trembling in court as she described how proceeds from the seven loads of timber Raines never paid her for were supposed to defray the cost of her husband’s kidney transplant.

The woman’s daughter, a victim herself, then glared at Raines as she testified about him trucking six loads of timber off her own property, never paying for it.

“The main thing I want to know,” the daughter, Rita Armstrong, said, “is why he did this. ... How can you sleep at night?”

When it came his turn to speak, Raines, 53, of Lizella, offered no explanation, saying only that others in his family’s logging outfit, Raines Trucking, had left him to shoulder the blame.

“All of it fell on me because I was the one cutting the trees,” Raines said.

When Raines, a skinny, goateed 6-footer, finished talking, Bibb County Superior Court Judge Tommy Day Wilcox sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Last week, Raines pleaded guilty in the case to two counts of felony theft by taking.

The counts stem from a 2006 transaction involving the fleeced Lizella family members -- Armstrong and her mother, Margaret McGowan -- who were taken for a combined total of more than $8,000.

But at Thursday’s hearing, assistant district attorney Angela J. Manson noted half a dozen other midstate cases in recent years involving landowners who went unpaid for timber Raines cut and hauled away.

In a Twiggs County case, Raines was ordered to pay $17,000 in restitution.

“This was a widespread criminal enterprise,” Manson said, adding that the Raines “scam” had, according to some in Georgia’s timber industry, given loggers “a bad name.”

Julius Harris, a Bolingbroke man who reported Raines to authorities in 2007, testified Thursday that Raines agreed to pay him $250 a load to cut six loads of trees on his land.

Harris won a Monroe County civil judgment against Raines and was awarded about $1,000 but never received any payment. Harris wanted to use the money to cover property taxes on the 15 acres he owns along Pea Ridge Road in south Monroe County.

Harris said that when Raines didn’t pay him and then didn’t return his calls, Harris tracked down Raines’ mother. Still, Harris said, he never saw his money but said an angry Raines did contact him for “upsetting” his mother.

“This is a man that don’t deserve to be on the street,” Harris said. “I felt like he raped me.”

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.