Heart-wrenching testimony from a pawn shop owner who was stabbed and robbed helped convince a Cobb County judge on Friday to sentence his admitted attacker to life with the possibility of parole.
Doug Haddon, a 59-year-old married father of four, said he, his family and his business have endured a grueling recovery in the two years since a former Wheeler High School student ambushed him at Hock Shop pawn store on Cobb Parkway at Gresham Road.
“I have to live with this grotesque scar on my abdomen and my hip every day,” Haddon told the court, according to a press release issued by the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office.
Tomas Lopez Torres Jr., 20, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of aggravated assault and aggravated battery in connection with the April 14, 2012, crime and several other armed robberies between Feb. 17 and May 7, 2012, at two small shops and a convenience store.
Torres admitted to hanging out with the wrong crowd and using marijuana and cocaine during what was his senior year of high school at the time. He said he committed the robberies because he wanted money to buy drugs, prosecutors said.
The morning of the Hock Shop attack, Torres ambushed Haddon from behind and stabbed him once in the abdomen and once in the hip. The assault left a gash 14 inches long across Haddon’s abdomen as well as a 6- to 8-inch-long wound in his hip.
An off-duty Marietta police detective helped crack the case after noticing that a knife for sale in the camping department of Walmart was the same kind used in the stabbing. As it turned out, Mr. Torres had purchased the knife a few days before the stabbing, prosecutors said. A surveillance video of the purchase helped police link him to the crime.
Several of Torres’ friends, relatives and even a former teacher begged Cobb County Superior Court Judge Robert E. Flournoy to be merciful with his sentence.
However, Senior Assistant District Attorney Ann Harris indicated Torres was lucky to have faced only aggravated assault and armed robbery charges.
“He came very, very close to a murder charge,” Harris said in a statement. “He had everything — a family that loved him and raised him right. And this is what he chose to do in the community.”
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