A man was sentenced Tuesday to serve nearly two decades in prison in a Fulton County cold case that happened 26 years ago, court records show.
Jerry Lee Sr. entered a negotiated guilty plea to charges of voluntary manslaughter, burglary and aggravated assault in the May 25, 1997, fatal shooting of Lorrie Ann Smith. The 66-year-old, who was initially also facing charges of murder, was sentenced to serve 18 years in prison, according to records.
“Lorrie Ann Smith’s family had waited for a long time for some answers to her death. Although it won’t bring her back, her family can now take solace that her killer has been identified and he will spend many years behind bars,” the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
The Cobb office prosecuted the case after the Fulton DA’s office recused because District Attorney Fani Willis previously represented Lee in private practice.
For more than two decades, investigators worked to solve the cold case. It was only in 2018 that Lee was tied to the death and arrested after DNA from the crime scene matched his own, officials previously said.
On the day of the killing, the victim’s parents found the 28-year-old shot several times in the back at her home on Stonewall Tell Road. Fulton police said Smith, who was a youth counselor at a local church, fought back against her attacker.
Evidence from the scene was sent to a DNA testing company, Parabon NanoLabs, which found a similar strand in their system from someone who was trying to find out about their family ancestry, detectives stated. Investigators discovered it was one of Lee’s relatives.
Police obtained a warrant to get Lee’s DNA and it turned out to be a match.
“It feels wonderful to finally bring some kind of closure to the family,” Fulton police Maj. Twanesa Howard told Channel 2 Action News soon after Lee’s arrest in Alabama, where he was living at the time.
Channel 2 also reported that Lee was a correctional officer for the Atlanta Department of Corrections at the time of Smith’s homicide and lived less than a minute from her home. According to the Cobb DA’s office, Smith did not know Lee.
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