FORT VALLEY — On a cold Sunday night in January 2022, a Winnebago motor home with North Dakota plates wheeled into the parking lot of a gas station megamart along I-75, about half an hour south of Macon.
On the floor inside the RV lay a 9-month-old boy. Bruises covered his body. His left cheek was swollen purple. His mouth was bloodied. His legs and some of his ribs were broken. He was not breathing.
The child’s father, in a fit of rage, had delivered deadly blows, investigators said. He allowed the mother to leave the RV to summon help. But it was too late. Their infant son would not survive. He died a few days later in an Atlanta hospital.
Word of the beating death and the murder charges brought against his parents made news across the South. That was in part because of where the parents happened to stop the night the boy was beaten unconscious: at a Buc-ee’s. He became known, a prosecutor would later say, as “the Buc-ee’s baby.”
His name was Cody Palmer, and police and prosecutors spent more than two years quietly building a murder case that would paint a sickening portrait of the abuse inflicted by his father.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
In recent days, as Christopher Scott Palmer’s murder trial unfolded in a Peach County courtroom, something else emerged: How the law enforcement system joined forces with health care and social workers to try to make sure Cody’s big brothers wouldn’t suffer the same fate.
‘A good man for you’
On that 43-degree night nearly three years ago, Cody’s family’s roaming, ramshackle life on the American edge ran aground at, of all places, a gleaming gasoline emporium, a modern-day beacon of roadside convenience and sappy charm.
Their troubles had spanned the continent, from the Dakotas to Florida, from cars to campgrounds to tents to, finally, that 1998 motor home, according to courtroom testimony. Palmer scraped by on odd jobs and on Cody’s mother’s $800-a-month disability check. They panhandled for food. They begged for gas money at the pumps. In the hours before Cody died, they bought scratch-off lottery tickets, ever-hopeful of a windfall.
At the Buc-ee’s, store employees were first on the scene. They rushed and performed CPR on the grievously injured baby. Medics, nurses, doctors and police officers also did their parts, the latter venturing inside the RV to find two more children, a pair of boys, ages 2 and 7, peering up at them. Cody’s big brothers were unharmed but frightened. It would be their last-ever night in what was later described as a dungeon on wheels.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Cody’s mother, Shelly Deanna Rooks, who is now 28, hailed from deep southeast Georgia and a town called Waynesville, a dot on the map between Waycross and Brunswick. She has severe learning disabilities, prosecutors said, and was a victim of emotional and physical abuse, a toll exacted by Cody’s father. She, too, was charged with murder in Cody’s death. But, in part because tests show she has an IQ of 57, she will likely never be tried. She’s been deemed incompetent, prosecutors and a psychologist who examined her said.
Palmer, 43, is a convicted sex offender from New York state, east of Syracuse. His criminal history — burglary, drug possession, resisting arrest, sexual abuse — dates to at least 2005.
During his murder trial, which began in Peach County Superior Court on Nov. 18, he said Cody had squirmed out of his grasp, banged his head and been knocked unconscious.
“You will,” a prosecutor told jurors in his opening statement, “be able to simply discount this version as the pitiful efforts of an abusive individual trying to talk his way out of a murder charge.”
Doctors, including a child-abuse expert from Scottish Rite Hospital, said Cody’s extensive injuries could not have happened in such a fall.
Prosecutors played body-camera footage from Warner Robins police, the first law enforcement on the scene, in which Palmer, cussing and at times irate, could be heard telling the officers that he had repeatedly hit Cody, but only to rouse him from unconsciousness.
He later asked a cop how much prison time someone might get for child abuse. “Just ballpark it,” Palmer said. Then, after his son was whisked away by ambulance, Palmer said, “If he dies, it’s going to hurt twice. I lose my son, and I lose my freedom.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Prosecutors said Palmer had abused Cody over a period of weeks or months. On the night Cody died, Palmer again tore into the 9-month-old because he was crying and would not do as his father commanded, to “shut up!” On Monday, jurors deliberated barely an hour before returning a guilty verdict. Palmer was sentenced to life without parole.
Palmer had met Rooks sometime around 2017 after, for reasons still unclear, he had made his way south. Rooks was out shopping one day and noticed him in a Walmart parking lot. He was panhandling.
Rooks testified at Palmer’s trial that her sister had been with her that day. When they spotted Palmer, her sister said, “He might make a good man for you.” He was anything but.
For the better part of half a decade, they crisscrossed the country together. At one point in their travels across the Midwest, she said Palmer jammed a gun in her mouth and told her to tell her children goodbye. Another time, she said, he fired a shot that whizzed past her and pierced the wall of their RV. She said he also doused her with a gallon of bleach until her skin burned red and he wouldn’t let her rinse it off.
Rooks had given birth to the oldest of her boys when she was 17 and in a relationship with another man in South Georgia. Rooks went on to have three more sons with Palmer. Two of them — including Cody and a weeks-old boy who died in the early 2020s of what the authorities deemed an accidental smothering death in his mother’s bed — would not live to see their first birthdays.
‘Enduring this torture’
Cody’s surviving brothers, now ages 5 and 10, are living together in foster care.
During Palmer’s trial, prosecutors hinted that boys had been, in essence, rescued the night of Jan. 30, 2022, at Buc-ee’s.
The oldest boy, Cody’s half brother, took the witness stand and helped prosecutors prove their case. The boy told of how he had tried to shield Cody at times, to protect him. He told how Cody had been crying and how that enraged Palmer on the night the baby was fatally beaten.
There was also evidence presented that suggested Cody’s brothers had been physically abused by Palmer, that they’d been struck with slats of wood and burned with cigarettes. The oldest boy may have been stabbed in the neck. Rooks testified that Palmer sometimes dragged her by a dog leash and handcuffed her to the camper. She said he duct-taped rags over her mouth and her older son’s mouth so people outside couldn’t hear their screams when he hit them.
“I guess,” she said, “we did something wrong that he didn’t like.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
At a hearing where Palmer was denied bond in 2022, his lawyer, Bobby Bearden, said Palmer had told him of how he “got passed up” in school and “had trouble learning.”
“I’m pretty sure he has some serious mental problems,” Bearden said, noting that Palmer told him that he had been schizophrenic since he was “a little kid.”
Bearden said Palmer also told him he was addicted to methamphetamine and had quit using crack cocaine sometime around 2016.
“Sometimes,” Bearden said of his client, “he loses touch with reality.”
On Monday evening, after the jury’s verdict was read, jurors wanted to know that the surviving brothers were in good hands.
Peach County Sheriff Terry Deese, a four-decade lawman, said police and child advocates had worked together to make sure the boys were.
“This case is a prime example of how our system does work,” he said.
Deese said it was by chance that Palmer stopped in his county beneath the bright lights at Buc-ee’s
“It draws people to our little normally peaceful community,” the sheriff said. “They did just happen to stop (with) these kids who had been enduring this torture for a couple of years. While it’s a tragedy, it’s a good thing it happened at a place where so many people were, who stepped up and brought all that to light.”
Buc-ee’s, there along I-75, a few exits north of Perry, sits at a nexus of policing jurisdictions — Houston and Peach counties and the city of Warner Robins — a spot where territorial fiefdoms could have seen parts of the case, the fates of the surviving children, slip through the cracks.
“But when there’s the death of a 9-month-old,” Deese said, “that motivates everybody to put their egos in their pockets and do what we’re trained to do.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
From the outset that night at Buc-ee’s, police and health care workers and, soon, child-services officials worked in unison to find a new home for Cody’s brothers, as well as to bring Palmer to justice, said Macon Judicial Circuit senior prosecutor Neil A. Halvorson, a 19-year veteran and methodical courtroom tactician.
“I thought they did a masterful job of juggling all of those things,” Halvorson said. “(They) were genuinely concerned about (the brothers) throughout the entire process.”
He lauded the oldest brother’s foster father, who agreed to allow the boy, now 10 years old, to testify.
The child helped seal Palmer’s fate.
‘Do you know this guy?’
Cody’s big brother marched into court and plunked down on the witness stand.
A roomful of grown-ups watched him settle in.
He didn’t seem nervous in the least.
He said he had gone on a cruise with his new family. He said they’d visited a cave with a waterfall. He went to summer camp.
He said that, yes, he knew the difference between the truth and a lie.
He said his favorite subject in school was “gym.”
The courtroom laughed.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
He said he had been in his old family’s motor home with their dogs Hopper and Diesel the night Cody was hurt.
“My brother died because of Train,” he said, invoking Palmer’s nickname.
The boy said Palmer hadn’t liked it when Cody made “noise.”
“What did Train say to Cody?” prosecutor Halvorson asked.
“Shut up.”
“Did Cody shut up?”
“No.”
Jurors sat rapt.
They had seen images of what happened to Cody. Now they heard why.
Halvorson had eased the 10-year-old into questioning. They chatted about other things the boy liked, football and basketball.
Halvorson turned to the boy’s foster father seated in the front row of the courtroom. He was behind the prosecutors’ table and he was smiling.
“Do you know this guy?” Halvorson asked the boy.
“Yep.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dad.”
His foster dad beamed.
Halvorson asked the boy about his new home with his brother and now a sister and some dogs.
“And a cat,” the boy said.
He said the dogs are named Indiana, October and Oscar Mayer.
“I bet I know what kind of dog he is,” the judge chimed in.
“He’s a wiener,” the boy replied.
The courtroom again broke out in laughter.
In the front row, that new dad beamed some more.
At the defense table, Christopher Palmer stared at the floor.
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