‘Deranged’ murderer says voices urged him to kill Ga. woman and attack college kids
The night he shot and killed a random stranger, Quentin Sanders roamed the heart of inner-city Macon in the rain. He had voices in his head and a .40-caliber pistol in his pocket.
At age 41, he had been in and out of prison twice since the turn of the century. In 1999, he attacked someone in Columbus. A decade later, in 2010, he opened fire on his girlfriend in Montezuma, and a bullet he fired wounded his 3-year-old daughter.
More recently, in 2015, Sanders was sent away for assaulting a cop in Dooly County. He was paroled last September. But 125 days later, on the night of Jan. 8, he was wandering the streets of Macon. He happened upon a woman named Ida Mae Ford.
She had been home watching a movie about 9:30 p.m. when she stepped outside her place on Winship Street. She ventured into the darkness just west across Interstate 75 from the Mercer University campus.
She headed toward Madden Avenue and Pio Nono Lane, where gravestones in a church cemetery parquet the hillside up to Pio Nono Avenue.
The police think Ford, a 49-year-old custodian at First Baptist Church of Christ, was walking to a corner store at Montpelier Avenue. She had on a shower cap and pajamas. She was carrying an umbrella.
Sanders, stranded in Macon for several days after traveling from Montezuma to visit a friend in the hospital here, spotted Ford coming up behind him.
Sanders had been sleeping in city parks for the better part of a week. He likely hung out around Duncan and Carling avenues, which parallel the freeway in a neighborhood between Central High School and Mercer. He had lived there for a time in the 1990s.
He was known to use the alias “Tuff” as his surname. His nickname, “Tip,” may stem from an incident in 1998 when — according to him — someone shot him six times with a .44 and blew off part of a finger.
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Daniel Shurley, a Bibb County sheriff’s investigator who handled the Ford case, said her death was in ways “more heinous” than a lot of Macon killings. She was “just minding her own business,” he added, and doing nothing wrong.
“She ran into this monster,” Shurley said. “He’s obviously a deranged individual … an impulse killer.”
‘What made you shoot her?’
In late January, a few weeks after killing Ford, Sanders was arrested in Macon County — 50 or so miles southwest of Bibb County — where he was charged with killing another woman and her son in the town of Oglethorpe.
After his arrest in the Oglethorpe killings, he confessed to gunning down Ford and to assaulting half a dozen Mercer students before later stealing a van at gunpoint and fleeing Macon.
GBI agents called Bibb sheriff’s officials and told them about Sanders confessing to the crime spree here. Three investigators rode down to Macon County to question Sanders on Jan. 29 and verify his version of events.
A transcript of his statement obtained by The Telegraph through an open records request is a telling glimpse into the actions of an admitted murderer. But Sanders doesn’t mention what set him off. He doesn’t seem to know.
As he began questioning Sanders, Shurley asked, “What can you tell me?”
Sanders wasted no time. His telling of Ford’s murder came cold and quick.
“I saw a lady walking. I think it was right before, ah, Madden Avenue, and, um, I saw she was walking, and, ah, she asked me where I was going,” Sanders recalled. “She said she was going one way. I said I was going another way, and I shot her.”
Sanders, who that night was toting a .40-caliber handgun he’d bought from someone in Macon County, was bound for the Pio Nono area. He said he had just left a spot on the run-down east side of Unionville in a neighborhood across I-75 from the well-lit eateries and cushy loft apartments of Mercer Village.
Sanders told of slowing his pace, letting Ford catch up with him.
“I was just like, uh, ‘Where you going?’ … I thought she smoked crack or whatever,” Sanders said. “I asked her if she wanted some. She said she didn’t do (drugs), and she was going up by Pio Nono or something, and I shot her for no reason. … I didn’t try to rob her or anything.”
He couldn’t recall what day it was, just that it was “kind of cool that night.”
“We had those few words,” Sanders told the investigators, “and I shot her.”
Ford, shot in the top of her chest at about the neckline, fell dead.
“What made you, if you know,” Shurley asked, “what made you shoot her?”
“Sir, really, I just, I don’t know,” Sanders answered. “I been having these things, and I just was like something, these, just, these voices was telling me just to do it. And I know it wasn’t me, but I did it. And there is no reason to blame or nothing, or blaming anybody else. It was me that did it. Whether voices — or whatever … was in my mind. … I was doing a lot of senseless other crimes off the same impulse after that.”
Shurley was careful to extract details that only the killer would know. He made sure Sanders didn’t claim responsibility for things he didn’t do.
“I did it,” Sanders said.
In the days that followed, he would do even more.
‘I just started shooting’
Sanders was stuck in Macon.
He didn’t have a ride back to Montezuma. The car he had borrowed from an acquaintance named “Skeet” had been driven back to Macon County by another guy Sanders knew.
So after visiting his friend in the hospital, Sanders said he spent days “wandering all around Macon … homeless.”
He hiked out Gray Highway to Walmart and bought some pants.
Born in Middle Georgia but raised in Austin, Texas, Sanders has a criminal record there dating back to 1993 for breaking into a car, fleeing police and marijuana possession.
According to his statement to investigators here, it was as if he just snapped in early January. There was nothing more to it, he said. He made no mention of mental illness, financial straits or addiction.
“I kind of just went,” he said, and started “doing stupid stuff.”
Two nights after Ford’s murder, he fired shots at four Mercer University students and a bystander. Earlier that same day, he robbed a Mercer student at gunpoint in nearby Tattnall Square Park.
The student Sanders held up in the park was in a restroom near some tennis courts. Sanders told investigators he saw the student in one of the stalls, crawled beneath the stall walls and tied the student up with the student’s belt and shoe laces.
“He had like three bucks, and I told him I was hungry. … We talked a little second, and I explained to him that I was really sorry about it,” Sanders said.
He said he told the student about his family, how he has three children and that he “was messed up pretty bad.”
Sanders said he took the student’s cellphone, busted it and then walked out Gray Highway to the Walmart.
Hours later, about 10 p.m., Sanders found himself on a bench, again near the college, at the entrance to Mercer Village on Coleman Avenue.
What he did next would rattle the campus for days.
Sanders said something inside told him “if you don’t do this” you’re gonna be stuck in Macon.
“I just saw the kids,” he said, “and I just started shooting.”
Sanders said he didn’t exactly try to hit the students, that he didn’t aim.
“I could’ve shot one of them,” he said, “but I didn’t. But I was close enough where I could’ve.”
He was, he said, still “trying to fight” the voices in his head.
Sanders, during questioning by the police, told Bibb sheriff’s investigator Robert Shockley that while he was sitting on the bench that night, for whatever reason, he “jumped up and … just shot.”
Sanders said afterward he slept in some bushes along the I-75 embankment nearby.
“I heard officers right there,” he said. “I hid the gun there … and I came back later ... and I went and got the gun.”
Two days after that, on Jan. 12, Sanders stole a woman’s Honda minivan in a carjacking a mile or so away at Coleman Hill, which overlooks downtown.
Seven days later, two more people would die — the mother and son in Macon County.
Charges in those slayings are still pending against Sanders.
But on Aug. 24, Sanders, now 42, pleaded guilty to killing Ford and to the other attacks in what a prosecutor termed “a one-man crime wave.”
Sanders was sentenced to 50 years behind bars. He will be 92 before he can even be considered for parole.
“I just made a lot of bad choices,” he told the judge. “It was a point in my life that, at that time, I just didn’t care about anything.”
This story was originally published August 31, 2018 at 10:24 AM with the headline "‘Deranged’ murderer says voices urged him to kill Ga. woman and attack college kids."