Life or death? Jury to decide fate of man convicted of murdering two GA prison guards
It was just after the lunch-hour recess in Putnam County Superior Court on Sunday. Jurors in the death penalty phase of Donnie Russell Rowe Jr.’s murder trial had finished their catered baked chicken dinners. For a moment, Rowe sat alone at the defense table. He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.
He seemed to know what was coming, and almost certainly did.
In the coming hours he would sit and at times quietly cry. His first cousin and childhood protector, a woman he hadn’t seen or spoken to in the better part of three decades, was about to, in open court, tell the jury impaneled to decide his fate why or possibly how Rowe’s life sailed off the tracks. Or, as one of Rowe’s lawyers would put it, veered “down a very dark road.”
Rowe, 48, was convicted last week of murdering Georgia Department of Corrections officers Curtis Billue and Christopher Monica during an escape from a prison bus in June 2017. Rowe’s alleged accomplice has admitted firing the fatal shots — and surveillance footage from the bus shows as much — that killed the guards. Now the jurors who convicted Rowe must decide whether Rowe should be sentenced to die or be sent to prison for the rest of his life.
Prosecutors contend life in prison is not enough. They say Rowe was already serving life without parole for his conviction in a 2001 armed robbery at a Macon motel, that his is a life not worth saving.
Rowe’s defense team acknowledged at the outset, before testimony in the trial began a week ago, that Rowe was guilty of his role in the murderous escape. But, they said, Rowe himself had not directly killed, that he had not squeezed the trigger of the pistol that took the officers’ lives.
His lawyers’ aim from the outset has been geared toward one thing: sparing Rowe’s life, keeping him off death row.
‘Nobody escaped it’
On Sunday, his attorneys began calling to the witness stand friends and relatives of Rowe’s who recalled his grim and cruel childhood, one said to have been rife with abuse, neglect and trauma.
Some of the episodes recounted from his nomadic, rural-Tennessee upbringing in a traveling, extended “hippie” family commune, were nothing short of shocking.
Rowe’s cousin Tammy Mansker, a year or so older than him, said she grew up calling Rowe by the nickname “Boo.”
“Like ‘boo-hoo,’ like you’re crying,” Mansker explained.
She said her mother’s family was kin to Rowe’s and described growing up poor, bouncing town to town from Tennessee to Alabama, Florida and Virginia, and once attending seven different schools in the same year. The family, she said, moved for work and perhaps just as often because the grownups were running from the law, from foul drug deals or domestic strife.
“Nobody escaped it,” Mansker said.
She said the children lived in the constant flux of drama, from fear of being beaten to “all hell breaking loose.”
‘A walking bruise’
Mansker said Rowe’s stepfather whipped him, kicked and punched him. She recalled a family meal where she gave Rowe, possibly in his teens, permission to take a biscuit from her plate. The stepfather, she said, for some reason frowned on sharing food at the table. As Rowe reached for the biscuit, Mansker said, the stepfather stabbed Rowe in the hand with a dinner fork. The fork stuck in Rowe’s hand. The stepfather, for a time, forbade anyone from taking it out.
Mansker went on to describe the young Rowe as “a walking bruise,” a child whose mother was known to drag him by his hair “like a rag doll.”
When Mansker spoke of the abuse at his mother’s hand, Rowe could be heard sobbing at the defense table, choking up.
Mankser said Rowe’s mother referred to him as “a curse.” Rowe’s mother, she said, wished he had never been born. Rowe was, the mother supposedly said, “a sunken chest wound ... dead weight.”
But the young Rowe would “just take it,” Mansker said, and “swallow it down and move on.”
She also said Rowe had been good with animals, but that his stepfather once shot his puppy.
Mansker also mentioned another family dinner where, halfway into the meal, Rowe’s mother let it be known they were eating Rowe’s pet rabbit, which Rowe’s mother had cooked.
Sentencing phase continues
Mansker said she knows her cousin will die in prison and that his crimes are “horrible.”
Even so, in asking that jurors take mercy on Rowe, she said, “I feel like I failed. ... I believe your childhood somewhat does make you what you are.”
She said Rowe was “not given a chance,” that he “had a good heart” as a kid.
On Monday, Rowe’s lawyers continued their efforts, calling to the stand acquaintances of Rowe’s and a psychologist who testified, in part, about his unstable upbringing.
It is possible that jurors could begin deliberating at midweek.
This story was originally published September 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.