A woman who tried to protect her son from a murder investigation is going to prison for lying to Atlanta police looking for the killers of a taxi driver, authorities said Monday.
Deena Davis was sentenced to six years after she pleaded guilty Monday in Fulton County Superior Court to one count of false statements and two counts of hindering the apprehension of a criminal.
Under the sentence handed down by Presiding Judge Kelley Amanda Lee, the 45-year-old Davis must serve the first year in a state penitentiary and the balance on probation, according to a news release from the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.
Davis is the mother of Quantavious Harris, who was convicted and sentenced to life plus 10 years in prison last September for the murder of 57- year-old cab driver Stephen Anim. Harris’ co-defendant, Samuel Ellis, was convicted May 17 and sentenced to life plus five years in prison.
Anim was shot to death April 22, 2009, in a robbery. Harris and Ellis were 17 and 16, respectively, when surveillance video showed them getting into Anim’s cab at the Hamilton E. Holmes MARTA station. (Both teens were tried as adults.)
After the crime, Davis destroyed evidence, apparently seeing that the clothes her son wore at the time of the killing were removed, prosecutors said.
The woman also tried to create an alibi for Harris by claiming his 14-year-old brother was with him the night of the crime, and that neither entered the victim’s cab. Davis told investigators that she picked up her younger son and the co-defendant from the MARTA station.
Five days later, Davis admitted to police that she had lied and her 14-year-old son was not with her other son at the MARTA station, but she lied once more, telling police she could not identify a male in the surveillance video that turned out to be Harris, prosecutors said.
“Fortunately, Harris was ultimately convicted of murder, but due to his mother’s repeated lies and attempts to thwart the murder investigation, his arrest was delayed by a couple of months,” prosecutors said.
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