UPDATE: At 12:37 p.m. on Thursday, this story was updated as new documents related to the indictments were released.
A Chatham County grand jury voted Wednesday to indict two former Savannah Police Department officers on charges of perjury.
The first indictment accuses former Cpl. Darryl Repress of one count of perjury, three counts of violation of oath by a public officer, and two counts of making a false statement. The second indictment accuses former homicide detective Ashley Wood of four counts of perjury and four counts of violation of oath by a public officer.
These are the first criminal cases that Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones’ office has independently brought against police officers since she was elected. Repress’ firing last fall came shortly after Ashley Wood’s months before.
The Current GA’s reporter encountered Wood outside of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon when the grand jury was finishing up its decisions. The reporter asked Wood if she was Ashley Wood, to which she replied “no.” The reporter identified himself as a journalist and asked to speak with her, and she declined to comment.
Public court filings and interviews show issues of truthfulness from former detectives Repress and Wood impacted several criminal cases in the courts. The accusations against the high-level investigative roles rocked the police department and raised questions about internal checks and training.
Ashley Wood
The eight indicted charges against Wood encompass three different murder cases she worked on as a homicide detective.
The first four charges — two counts of perjury and two counts of violation of oath — deal with the murder of Charles Vinson in April 2021. Four people were arrested in that case, including Marquis Parrish and Javaris Roundtree.
The indictment says Wood made false statements about the men in applications for search warrants. Wood wrote in one warrant application that Parrish had a gun in a vehicle related to the murder case, and she wrote in another application that a witness saw Roundtree grab his gun and shoot at an apartment. Both were not true, the indictment states.
In the 2018 double murder case against Victor “Vic” McMillar, Wood wrote in an application that two witness said McMillar “was standing on the porch moments before the shooting in question.” Neither witness stated that, according to the indictment.
Lastly, Wood was accused of lying related to a 2020 murder and armed robbery case against Labrea Adger and Kevin Wilson, court documents show.
In a May 30, 2023, email obtained by The Current GA, prosecutor Christy Barker noticed that the records Wood referred to in her warrants didn’t exist.
“I received a copy of multiple returns sworn by Det. Wood in April, 2023. Onewas for T Mobile phone records for Labrea Adger stating that such records were either on a disc or on Evidence.com. I was not able to locate these records on the discs I had or on Evidence.com, and had previously requested them from Det. Wood several times. This morning I received confirmation that SPD has been unable to locate the records, either,” Barker wrote.
The indictment stated that Wood made false statements in that case.
Parrish filed a federal lawsuit against Wood in September 2023. He said he was unjustly incarcerated for nearly two years. His lawyer first discovered Wood’s credibility issues when the attorney checked Wood’s claim that Parrish was caught on video buying cleaning supplies with other suspects in the murder. The defense counsel reviewed the footage and found he was never there, court records state.
As a result of this, Wood was fired, reinstated and then demoted to work in code enforcement.
Darryl Repress
The perjury charge against Repress accuses him of testifying during a January bond hearing that Jerrell Williams, charged in a triple homicide case, was identified by a witness as “fleeing the crime scene when in fact (the witness) only identified Williams as a person he was familiar with.”
Repress often worked undercover and made a name for himself by cultivating community relationships for information to catch criminals. But those relationships became his undoing in June 2023, when a citizen accused Repress of interceding in a criminal case on behalf of a non-official police informant.
An internal affairs investigation by SPD revealed that Repress bought shoplifted clothes from his non-official informant, a convicted felon, and initially lied about it. He also was untruthful to SPD about his relationship with that informant, which at one point was sexual.
Those findings are the basis for the five other charges on the indictment.
Grand jury proceedings on Wednesday stretched well in the late afternoon.
The witnesses in the Repress’ deliberations included Savannah defense attorney, Jonah Pine, who represents Jerrell Williams in the triple homicide case, two DA’s office investigators, and Repress himself.
In Wood’s deliberations, she was also listed as a witness. Under Georgia law, police officers are allowed to be in the grand jury room and testify in their own defense when investigated — a right not afforded to most citizens.
Credit: The Current GA
Credit: The Current GA
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