Macon man fatally stabbed in GA prison while serving life sentence for killing girlfriend
Ali Lamont Tanner, who was sent to prison in November 2015 for stabbing his girlfriend at a Macon motel and then stuffing her body in a dumpster, was stabbed to death Friday at a Georgia prison, officials said.
Details of Tanner’s death at Augusta State Medical Prison in Grovetown were not divulged by a prison spokeswoman who confirmed his death, but Columbia County Coroner Vernon W. Collins told The Telegraph that Tanner was stabbed by another inmate.
Tanner was serving a life-without-parole sentence plus 20 years in the Nov. 29, 2014, murder of his girlfriend, Shauntrice Michele Williams, 27.
Williams’ body, which had been crammed into a laundry bag and tossed in a dumpster at the Discovery Inn motel on Chambers Road in west Macon, was later found at a landfill in Taylor County.
Tanner, who took the witness stand in his own defense at his 2015 murder trial, claimed Williams had been the one who threatened him with a knife, that she had stabbed him a few months earlier.
Of their fatal encounter in late November 2014, Tanner testified that he feared for his life during a struggle over a knife at the motel — which happened while one of Williams’ children, then 3, was sleeping — and that he stabbed Williams in the heart.
“I ain’t no killer,” Tanner told the jury. “I loved that girl.”
Tanner later contradicted his own testimony and admitted telling the cops a different story, that he had grabbed the knife that Williams was killed with and that had she not seen the weapon coming when he stabbed her.
Jurors declared him guilty after deliberating for about half an hour.
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.