Tennessee prosecutors said Thursday that they will pursue the death penalty against the ex-convict accused of gunning down a family of four and then abandoning their seven-month-old baby miles away in another county.
Austin Robert Drummond, the 28-year-old defendant in the case, appeared virtually for his initial court appearance in Lake County after a weeklong manhunt for the ex-felon ended with his capture Tuesday.
The judge entered a not guilty plea on Drummond’s behalf since he doesn’t have a lawyer yet. He is being held without bond after police linked him to the quadruple slayings of the baby girl’s parents, grandmother and teenage uncle.
“That’s what I think people don’t understand, he took them all. It’s not just the loss of our son. It’s the loss of our daughter-in-law, Braydon, and everybody. Cortney. It’s a whole family gone. It’s unbelievable,” Kim Hamil, the mother of 21-year-old victim James Matthew Wilson, told WREG-TV.
“So we’re going to be here every chance we get. We’re going to be right here for our son because he cannot be here,” she said.
Drummond, who spent more than a decade behind bars for an armed robbery conviction, was out on bond on an attempted murder charge when authorities said he shot the family dead July 29 in Tiptonville.
Police said Drummond left the baby in a car seat outside a random home in Dyer County, nearly 40 miles away from the crime scene.
The Dyer County Sheriff’s Office said they originally tried to track down the infant’s parents, Mr. Wilson and 20-year-old Adrianna Williams. Deputies later found the couple dead alongside the baby’s 38-year-old grandmother, Cortney Rose, and 15-year-old uncle, Braydon Williams.
For a week, Drummond eluded an intense manhunt joined by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Marshals.
Home surveillance cameras spotted a rifle-toting Drummond in Jackson — his hometown — over the weekend, leading authorities to consolidate their search.
Shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday, police said they received several calls about Drummond hiding out in a vacant pool house. Officers swarmed the area and took Drummond into custody roughly 10 minutes later.
On top of murder charges, he also faces kidnapping and weapons-related offenses.
Three people — two men and a woman — have also been charged with being an accessory after the fact to murder, although authorities did not share details of how they may have helped Drummond.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation charged Dearrah Sanders, 23, with accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. Tanaka Brown and Giovantie Thomas, both 29, were charged over the weekend with being accessories to the murder.
Investigators have not publicly released a motive for the killings at this time.
WHBQ reported that Kaitlyn Speed, sister of victim Cortney Rose, was a corrections officer at the same facility where Drummond served his sentence. Family members told the station Ms. Speed and Drummond were in a relationship.
