Report: Bibb man accused of strangling ex-girlfriend held man at gunpoint while fleeing
New details emerged Wednesday in the death of Cynthia “Cindy” Berry, whose ex-boyfriend is accused of murdering her sometime last weekend.
An incident report filed by one of the first Bibb County sheriff’s deputy to arrive on the scene at Berry’s home in the wee hours of Monday morning said the deputy found Berry’s body on a couch.
She was lying on her back, the report said, with “what appeared to be a shoe string around her neck.”
Investigators have said they believe Berry, 49, was strangled sometime over the weekend, possibly Sunday night, by her former boyfriend, 50-year-old Joey Fournier, a local construction worker.
Court records show that the couple had lived together for much of the past decade but that sometime late last summer they split up and Berry obtained a protective order against Fournier on claims that he had physically abused her and, on one occasion, put her in a choke hold.
Fournier was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder after the authorities found him in northwest Georgia. Investigators have since dropped charges against Fournier’s brother, Jeffrey Fournier, who had been accused of hindering his apprehension, a sheriff’s spokesperson said Wednesday.
The initial incident report in the case, which was made public on Wednesday, said that the first sheriff’s deputy to arrive sometime after 1 a.m. Monday met Berry’s father and brother, who had grown concerned about her.
They said Berry, who worked as an office manager for her family’s construction company, lived alone and that her Ford Mustang was in the garage. But she wasn’t answering when they knocked on her door.
The deputy soon went inside and found Berry dead.
The deputy noted in the report that one of Berry’s family members that night learned from an apparent friend of Joey Fournier’s that Fournier had called sometime earlier and asked the friend to pick him up near Berry’s house.
The friend, according to the report, “picked up Joey up the street from the house and when Joey got in the car he put a gun to (the friend’s) head and told him to take him to (Joey’s) hunting club.”
“While on the way to the hunting club,” the report goes on, “Joey told (the friend) that him and Cindy got into a argument and that he choked her to death.”