Two men have been found guilty again of the 2008 kidnapping and armed robbery of an amusement games employee in Fayette County, police said Thursday.
They had appealed their original convictions, and in 2013, the Georgia Court of Appeals ordered new trials for them and three other men convicted of unrelated serious crimes in Fayette County because their trial judge was having an undisclosed affair with the defendants' public defender.
Christopher Deangelo Wakefield, 29, of Riverdale, was sentenced to life plus 25 years for armed robbery, kidnapping, aggravated assault, theft by taking (motor vehicle) and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
Travion Marquez Willis, 24, of College Park, was sentenced to life plus five years on the same charges.
According to Fayetteville police, an All-Star Amusement Games Inc. employee was leaving a North Glynn Street convenience store on June 16, 2008 when Wakefield and Willis held him up at gunpoint. They took his keys and cellphone, and forced him into the trunk of their Chevrolet Impala. Willis drove the Impala, with Wakefield following in the victim’s Chevrolet Tahoe, but they crashed into each other, allowing the victim to escape after he pulled the trunk’s emergency latch.
The men fled the scene. Willis was caught a short time later, while Wakefield was apprehended a week later in Riverdale by U.S. Marshals.
The retrial came after it was disclosed in 2010 that Paschal English, then the chief Fayette County Superior Court judge, was having a romantic relationship with assistant public defender Kimberly Cornwell. English resigned that year and Cornwell no longer works for the public defender’s office.
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