Murder trial begins for inmate accused of killing guards while escaping GA prison bus
Testimony began Monday in Putnam County Superior Court in the death penalty murder trial of a Georgia inmate accused of killing two corrections officers aboard a prison bus during a brazen highway escape four years ago.
Donnie Russell “Whiskey” Rowe, who had been serving life without parole for a 2002 armed robbery conviction in Bibb County, faces malice murder and felony murder charges as well as an escape charge at a trial that could last weeks.
Ricky “Juvie” Dubose, Rowe’s co-defendant in the June 13, 2017, attack, faces similar charges and is expected to be tried later.
Dubose has allegedly confessed his role as the triggerman in the officers’ deaths, which happened after Rowe jimmied a lock on a prison bus gate and the two prisoners burst into the driver’s compartment as the bus cruised through the countryside south of Lake Oconee at about dawn.
Footage of the shooting and the escape, which happened along Ga. Highway 16 between Sparta and Eatonton, was captured by security cameras on the bus.
Avoiding the death penalty
Rowe’s defense team on Monday acknowledged their client’s role in the slayings, which included a violent jailbreak and wild, two-state run from the law that ended a couple of days later in Tennessee after a freeway shootout with cops south of Nashville.
“Now I want to be clear about this,” attorney Franklin J. Hogue said in his opening statement to jurors. “The tragic deaths of these two officers was caused by Ricky Dubose, who committed malice murder, and Donnie Rowe, who committed felony murder.”
Rowe’s lawyers were not contesting Rowe’s involvement in the escape. Even so, his attorneys are clearly aiming to mitigate Rowe’s participation in the killings in hopes of possibly sparing him the death penalty.
Hogue told the jury, which was brought in from Grady County in south Georgia because of pretrial publicity, that Rowe is not without blame.
“Far from it,” Hogue said.
But Hogue stressed that it was Dubose and Dubose alone who chose to squeeze the trigger of a 9mm Glock pistol and fire three shots each into officers Curtis Billie and Christoper Monica.
The gun, which had been left unsecured in the front of the bus, was grabbed by Dubose, prosecutors say, after he and Rowe stormed through the security gate separating inmates from the officers.
Even if jurors do not convict Rowe of malice murder, a felony murder conviction — which would mean he was found guilty of an unintended death during the commission of a felony, in this case escape — would still make him eligible to be sentenced to the death.
In non-death penalty cases, both crimes are equally punishable by up to life in prison without parole. But in a death penalty case, felony murder convictions in the officers’ deaths could give Rowe’s lawyers more room to later argue that their client doesn’t deserve to be executed.
A ‘premeditated plan’
Prosecutor Dawn M. Baskin, the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit’s senior district attorney, emphasized repeatedly in her opening statement that Rowe planned and orchestrated the escape. A “premeditated plan,” she called it, one of “planning ... plotting ... scheming.”
Baskin said Rowe was “the driving force” behind the episode, the instigator of a plot that left two men dead in its wake.
She said Rowe enlisted Dubose, to unlock his shackles, as they and 31 other inmates rode in the predawn darkness en route to the state prison near Jackson on their way to transfers to other penitentiaries.
Baskin said the pair had noticed that as officer Billue was driving, officer Monica, seated beside him in the front of the bus, had fallen asleep.
She said Rowe used an ink pen that he had smuggled onboard to poke through the security gate and lift a lock that the officers had left unlocked on a hasp.
Baskin said that after Rowe busted into the front of the bus, Dubose, who had recently begun serving a 20-year prison term for aggravated assault and armed robbery in Elbert County, followed and snatched up the pistol, opening fire on the driver, Billue.
Baskin said Dubose then turned the gun on officer Monica, who Rowe had rushed and struck in the head with his unlocked shackles and wrestled to the floor of the bus’s doorwell.
‘Waiting for the opportunity to strike’
Dubose and Rowe had been housed in the days prior to the attack at a state prison in Milledgeville. Their transfer to other prisons began in the small hours of June 13, 2017.
The prosecutor said that before the attack, during at stop at Hancock State Prison in Sparta, Rowe used the pen he had to test the unlocked latch. He was able to open it and gain access to the front of the bus, where he stole one of the officers’ lunch boxes and handed out its contents to other prisoners on board.
On the highway east of Eatonton, Rowe was “waiting for the opportunity to strike,” Baskin told jurors, and soon “put his premeditated plan into action.”
She said Rowe gripped the “heavy chains and shackles” he’d worn and “slams them into” officer Monica, knocking him down.
Later in her opening remarks, the prosecutor told jurors they would soon seen the video recording of the slayings, which took all of 30 seconds.
“You will hear the shots,” Baskin said. “You will hear Christopher Monica cry out.”
She went on to describe what happened next, how Dubose and Rowe made their escape, commandeering a Honda Civic from an unsuspecting motorist who had stopped behind the bus on the highway.
Baskin said while Dubose confronted the driver at gunpoint, Rowe, aiming a second pistol from the bus at the Honda’s driver, walked up — or as she put it “almost strolled” to the Civic — “covered in the blood of his victims.”
Later on Monday, the Honda’s driver, a local construction worker named Phillip Beasley, was emotional, choking back tears at times as he took the witness stand and described the 2017 encounter.
Beasley, his voice breaking, said Dubose’s pistol had brushed his forehead as the convict ordered him out of the car.
Sobbing, Beasley said he dropped to his knees as the men drove off, thankful, he said, “blessed” to still be alive.
When Baskin, the prosecutor, asked Beasley if he saw Rowe, one of his two assailants, in the courtroom on Monday afternoon, Beasley instead stared downward.
He averted his eyes from the defense table where the spectacled, bearded, 6-foot-1 Rowe sat dressed in a light-blue dress shirt and gray slacks.
“I’d rather not look,” Beasley said.
This story was originally published September 20, 2021 at 5:27 PM.