Macon man who faked his own death while on parole for a machete attack found, police say
An ex-Macon man who pleaded guilty to attacking a woman here in 2015, threatening her with a hatchet and a machete, was arrested last week as a fugitive in Oklahoma City after fleeing Georgia and faking his own death while on parole, police said.
Christopher Lee Tomberlin, 37, pleaded guilty in December 2016 to multiple counts of aggravated assault in an attack on a woman he lived with on Flamingo Drive in southeast Macon.
According to a court filing after his arrest in the Nov. 28, 2015, assault, Tomberlin had a “history of treatment (and) prior diagnosis of bipolar/schizophrenia.”
On Dec. 19, 2016, Tomberlin was sentenced to 15 years, five of them in prison.
But he was released from Georgia State Prison in Reidsville on Sept. 17, 2018, to serve the remainder of his sentence on probation while, at least at first, living in Douglasville west of Atlanta.
On the run
However, after failing to report for probation, he was declared a fugitive. At some point after that, he somehow faked his own death, according to multiple published reports, which noted word of his “death” had been circulated on social media.
A Georgia probation officer spoke to Tomberlin’s mother on Dec. 30 last year and she said she didn’t know where he was.
His mother, according to a court filing, told the officer that when she talked to him by phone called her from a blocked number.
It was unclear what led authorities to his whereabouts in Oklahoma, just that, according to police there, his capture came on the heels of “weeks of investigative collaboration.”
Uncertain background
Tomberlin’s relationship to the woman he assaulted in Macon in 2015 — an attack in which he hurled a hatchet and missed her, but also was said to have bitten her — was also uncertain.
Some published accounts, including The Telegraph’s at the time of the assault, described the woman as his wife. Other accounts have since said she was his girlfriend.
On his Facebook profile for an account that appears to have been dormant since 2014, Tomberlin listed his hometown as Fitzgerald. He said he was at the time living in Jacksonville, Alabama, and that he had worked for a tree service and as a fitness trainer.
This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 12:11 PM.