Five men were convicted of torturing and killing a police informant in the fall of 2016 before leaving his body in the trunk of a car parked at an Atlanta MARTA station.
Christopher Lockett, 30, Xavier Gibson, 23, Quatez Clark, 21, Joshua Rooks, 27, and Jasper Green, 27, were convicted Monday of murder, participating in criminal street gang activity and other felony charges, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office said.
The men, who were members of the Gangster Disciples street gang, killed 33-year-old Christopher Dean at an Atlanta home after discovering that he was once a police witness in California, authorities said.
Investigators said Dean was tortured, sodomized and shot twice in the back of the head before his body was stuffed into the trunk of a Toyota Camry and left at the H.E. Holmes MARTA station.
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Prosecutors said Lockett lured Dean to a home he shared with his brother on Sandy Creek Drive in October 2016 under the guise that he was there for a drug transaction.
Several men then attacked Dean, beating him with a 2-by-4 and a crowbar for more than an hour in an effort to “show other gang members that working as a police witness would not be tolerated,” the DA’s office said.
Credit: Fulton County District Attorney's Office
Credit: Fulton County District Attorney's Office
Investigators also said Dean was sodomized with a handle-like object and that seminal fluid was discovered inside his rectal cavity.
Rooks then drove from the scene to pick up two men —Green and Lamar Almon — who he paid to clean up the murder scene and dispose of Dean’s body, prosecutors said. After witnessing the “gruesome condition” of the body, however, the men decided instead to leave Dean’s body in the trunk of Lockett’s car at the MARTA station.
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“In my opinion, this murder — with its torture which included a brutal beating, sodomy with a wooden or metal object, penile sodomy by one or all of the defendants, shooting of the victim to the back of the head and the partial decomposition of the body — represents the most horrific death in our county in recent history,” DA Paul Howard said in a statement.
Lockett, Gibson, Clark, Rooks and Green will be sentenced April 19. Almon and Gibson’s brother Orlando have not gone to trial.
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