Jermaine Henderson, armed with a pistol, and Desire Collins ordered the Marietta couple they’d kidnapped out of the car and backed them up to a ridge near a then-unopened SunTrust Park.
Prosecutors say the couple had arranged a marijuana buy in Buckhead for the West Coast drug dealers during January 2016. But the buyers paid in counterfeit money and the dealers blamed the couple.
On Monday, Henderson and Collins were sentenced to life in prison.
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“It’s not personal, it’s business,” Henderson said before shooting the Marietta barber twice and his pregnant girlfriend twice.
They tumbled down the ridge. Prosecutors say Henderson and Collins drove off in the pregnant woman’s car, leaving them for dead. They didn’t die, but the woman did lose her child.
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Collins, 22, will be eligible for parole after 30 years. Henderson, 36, won’t have that chance and was given an extra 120 years onto his life sentence.
“This absolutely was personal,” said Shep Orlow, a prosecutor on the case. “Shooting two people at point-blank range, intending to kill them? It doesn’t get any more personal than that.”
As it stands, they’ll spend the rest of their lives thousands of miles from home: Collins was living in Everett outside Seattle and Henderson hailed from metro Los Angeles’ Compton.
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They came from the West Coast to sell dozens of pounds of marijuana, prosecutors said. A childhood friend of Henderson connected him to the barber.
About an hour after the shooting, Henderson and Collins drove the girlfriends’ Toyota Camry to a Chevron on Cobb Parkway. There, Collins bought $3 of gas and filled up a 32 ounce Powerade bottle, according to a warrant.
She didn’t go back for the change, but they torched the car on an industrial stretch of Franklin Road.
They were sentenced on charges of assault, battery, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, arson and tampering with evidence.
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