Corruption helps a murderer go free!
District Attorney Layla Zohn stated that a death scene investigation was compromised due to Tommy Davis’s "manipulating" the body before crime scene photographs were taken! All three corrupt Sheriff Ezell Brown, District Attorney Layla Zon, and Coroner Tommy Davis refused to find the truth in the Kimberly Cox and David Montgomery death investigations.
Tommy Davis failed these people from the start. Both orphans deserve the truth about their parent's death. Both death investigations need to be reopened by the Coroner and the District Attorney.
Newton County Investigator Ty Major told a witness that Kimberly Cox's death would be ruled a suicide when he believed it was a homicide.
Evidence was destroyed in Sheriff Brown's Custody. Who is he protecting?
Death Of Kimberly Cox
The death of Kimberly Cox was a tragic event. She was having problems in her relationship, and she had agreed to give her house back to the bank. She had decided to move into father’s (Alan Cox) home. Kim and the children were temporarily staying at Alan Cox’s home. Kim had been arguing with her father and her husband. On the day before her death, she contacted her mother in Pennsylvania and asked her to get her children. Several text messages and phone calls were shown to have taken place between Kim and her mother on the day before her death. Kim’s mother arrived in Atlanta the day of her death and took her grandchildren home to Pennsylvania. Neither she nor the children were ever interviewed and the reason for her timely arrival on the day of Kim’s death was never discussed.
On the morning of her death, Kim left her father’s home to take her children to school. Alan Cox had agreed to let her bring her dog to his house, which he had not allowed before that day. Kim was planning to drop the children off at school and pick up her dog. Once these tasks were accomplished, she planned to go back to Alan’s home. She left the house in her sleeping garments with a blanket wrapped around herself. After her death, Kim’s garments did not show an extensive amount of blood and the blanket she was wrapped was not recovered nor visible in any of the crime scene photographs.
Kim started texting David at 5:30 am on the morning of her death. All texts and calls stopped at 8;30 am. Her phone was programmed to keep her text messages for a good deal of time. The text messages were not part of the coroner’s report. They were erased while in Sheriff’s custody. Alan Cox wanted to test the phone while in Sheriff’s custody. Sheriff Brown refused to have the phones tested. Sheriff Brown stated he was going to destroy all evidence including the phone if Alan did not pick up the evidence. Despite our public attempts to have the phone tested under court order, the Chief Judge of Newton County refused to compel testing. With this effort, the chain of custody was broken, and all the evidence compromised. Mr. Cox had the device tested by an independent firm. They told him the information of the text messages was cleared by the Sheriff while in his custody.
Kim normally entered her house through a door in the garage. Her friend drove out of her way that morning and saw Kim’s car outside the garage. She went into the house through a rear door and dropped her keys on the kitchen floor. According to the Coroner, Kim took her gun from her father’s house and went directly into her bedroom and started frantically loading her gun with bullets that were in her house. She then took the time to write a suicide note, tear it up, and throw it away. The note had no blood visible on the paper.
The coroner suggested she then fired a shot into her computer to test fire the weapon. Once the weapon was fired, Kim was to have shot herself in the chest with a second shot. The coroner suggested that she fired the weapon with two fingers from above her chest in a downward trajectory. In other words, the exact same position as a person standing above her and shooting down into her chest from above her. The autopsy did not calculate the trajectory of the bullet to see if the shot was possible by Kim. She did not receive a full autopsy since the Funeral home refunded Alan’s fee for reconstructing the body after the autopsy procedure.
The coroner has suggested that after shooting herself, she was very much alive for as much as an hour before the paramedics arrived. She was transported to the hospital at 10am code three. This effort would not have been made if she were still not alive at 10am. It is suggested that she did not shoot herself again nor call for help for over an hour. It seems implausible that a person would shoot themselves and not finish the job or call for help if there was no one there. The coroner is suggesting Kim would have taken the blanket around her and brought it somewhere else while she was bleeding out. The gun nor shell casings were ever fingerprinted to check for the presence of a different person. The gun and shell casings were part of the evidence that Alan Cox was forced to take from the Sheriff’s office.
Crime scene photographs clearly show a circular blood stain on the blinds above where the body was found. The stain is the same height as if a person were standing above Kim with their hand against the blinds. The blinds were not part of the collected evidence. The coroner has told both Mr. Cox and me that Kim’s small dog put blood on the blinds. No one ever saw any blood on the dog. The autopsy photographs show Kim naked with her hands bagged to preserve evidence. Evidence was not taken to see if she had been in an altercation. The photographs show no significant blood on her or the garments she was wearing at the time of her death.
Alan Cox rushed from his home to Kim’s home without making numerous phone calls to check on her status. He suggested she tried to kill herself with drugs. He was the only person to make this claim of suicide on the day of her death. It is important to note that he did not check for a gunshot even though the floor was covered in bullets and spent rounds were clear. While on the phone with 911, Alan discussed moving evidence from the original location.
In the District Attorney’s report on the case, the bloodwork was discussed in detail. The coroner did not ask for the blood to be tested for drugs in her system. Alan and I went to the Governor’s office after years to request that Kim’s blood be tested for drugs in her system. Alan received a call from the Governor's office before we reached the parking lot stating that her blood would be tested for drugs. The coroner did not have her blood sample tested. She did not have any drugs in her system that were not given to her without a doctor’s prescription. In short, she was sober and alert on a cold February morning when she shot herself and laid motionless for over an hour. Alan stated she was found with her hands extended over her head and a pillow under her back and laying across the side of the bed. In short, she used a pillow to hasten her death, but no pillow was found under her head.
Alan has since told me Kim’s phone was used to call David’s place of employment at 10 am. The phone call to the tattoo business where David worked was the last phone call made that morning. The phone call would have been made while Alan and the paramedics were on scene. All earlier calls and text had stopped, and the text messages were erased while in the Sheriff’s custody. David did not arrive on scene until 30 minutes after the last call was made.
The first responder to arrive at Kim’s house was Newton County Investigator Ty Major. He had a PERSONAL relationship with Kimberly. He arrived after hearing the call come out over the radio. Upon his arrival, he decided to reuse himself from the case. Kimberly’s friend Kristy arrived at the scene as the crime scene was fresh. She knew Investigator Major also. He stated to her that, “The Sheriff will call this a suicide, but it is a homicide.” Over the next few weeks, he kept Kristy informed of the progress of the case.
Alan Cox spoke with the Sheriff’s office about his concerns that this case was a homicide and he wanted more done to provide answers to his questions. He asked the Sheriff’s Department to investigate certain claims being made by Investigator Major about the case. The Sheriff conducted an internal investigation. Kristy was interviewed by a Sheriff’s investigator. Investigator Major was never interviewed, the witness tape was magically erased, and the phone records were not available. Kristy admitted to our investigator that she was falsifying her story at the request of Investigator Major. He said he had five children, and this charge could ruin his life. She said he continued to stay connected as we pursued justice in this case.
Later the day of her death, David went to his employer, returned his business phone, and quit his job. David received a severe burn on his arm. When the Sheriff’s Investigators spoke with him in a follow up interview about the lies, he told of his whereabouts on the morning of Kim’s death, he told them he had tried to commit suicide by placing his arm in a hot bathtub of water. The Investigators followed up on his location at the time of Kim’s death, but they bought the suicide theory from a known liar. He refused to go to the hospital for lack of funds. A physician friend saw his arm and helped as best he could.
No one ever checked their emails, Facebook postings, text messages, or their computers to see if there had been someone else with a real problem with either David or Kim. Kim’s computer was given to another friend that appeared at the scene on the day of her death. No one has ever looked at the postings to her Facebook being made after her death.
The District Attorney’s Investigator concluded she committed suicide over a two-year-old tattoo on her arm. He theorized that she had fantasies of blowing her head off as depicted in the drawing. As a tattoo artist, she had numerous tattoos on her body, but this one was the one that drove Kim to kill herself. There is nothing to suggest this story is correct. She did not blow her head off.
Death of David Montgomery
Thirty days after Kim’s death, David was found dead in their abandoned home. David had been staying with a friend and he was using Kim’s phone for his personal communication device. David’s friend reported finding him at his old home. He was found dead on the same day he was going to the hospital to have his arm treated. His physician friend told him he was going to lose his arm if he did not go to the hospital. It was obvious that he was concerned the suicide story would not be believed. He became a liability if he was forced to tell everything he knew.
Unfortunately, David had the same fool for a Coroner as Kim. David was found lying outside his car face down in their two-car garage. It seems obvious he was placed there after his death. The coroner saw a hibachi grill in the back seat of his car. Even though there were no burn marks on the seat, the coroner decided that he died in a suicide attempt with his hibachi grill. He was so sure of his conclusion that he had Investigators try to replicate the destruction of a car by hibachi grill. The Investigators could not make the theory work in practice. Even the GBI asked for the quantity of propane the grill had available. They were shocked to find out that it was a charcoal unit. By then David’s remains had been cremated and the story had come apart.
David’s toxicology tests came back positive for nicotine. He had no intoxicants of any kind in his body. He was neither drunk nor high at the time of his death. The crime scene included marijuana roaches, cigarette butts, alcohol, and a package of unsmoked cigarettes. Cigarettes and alcohol were found near the body outside the car while the spent smoke was in an ashtray. Neither cigarettes nor alcohol were David’s brand of choice. He had a history of being very particular about his choices in this area.
He was found in a prone position with his face looking to his left. The right side of his face was directly on the ground. He had no real bruising on the right side of his face postmortem. The front of his face had serious trauma. Since his face had not been facing downward, the District Attorney’s report stated that the coroner had manipulated the body at the crime scene before any photos were taken. The lead Investigator denies this ever happened. The problem with this theory was the complete lack of blood at the crime scene. Imagine a bloody face with no blood at all.
The coroner had a theory that was debunked, a body that had trauma to the face with no blood, a clean toxicology report, and no body to examine. It presented itself as a real problem for those interested in closing the case. After nine months, the GBI found some scarring on his heart and a miracle diagnosis of a heart attack was ruled the cause of death. The case was closed and the back pedaling started. The District Attorney told Alan Cox and me that David was a devil worshipper and he got what he deserved.
We asked the District Attorney to reopen the case and collect their computer from Kim’s friend, the liquor bottle, and cigarettes from David’s crime scene in his father’s possession and test the spent cigarettes and marijuana for DNA. She refused to test anything. She wanted to call Kim and David’s friend and ask her to bring in her computer. We obviously objected to this idea since the chance of seeing this evidence become known was slim to none. Nothing was ever recovered or tested. David’s evidence was given to Alan Cox as a part of the evidence dumped by Sheriff Brown. The District Attorney released her report after five months of requests.
After David’s death, a friend went online to sell her collection of tattoos artwork. She stated in her post that she wanted to leave in a hurry because of David’s death. She felt her life was in danger due to the circumstances around his death. This posting was never entered into David or Kim’s file. Even after Alan’s request to put it in their file, it was not there at last look. It was an inconvenient truth that would have brought everyone’s work in this case into question.
Our Role
We met Alan Cox in his role as the Chairman of the Jasper County Commission. It was during our advocacy efforts for victims of child sex crimes that we began speaking about the two cases above. He was told that we would try to find the truth about the two children orphaned in this case. We were sure to tell him that any evidence that implied his involvement would lead us to target him for arrest and prosecution. Under those circumstances we agreed to find the truth for his grandchildren.
We have received no compensation for our efforts over the last five years. As usual, we have been denounced and pressured over the years to stop looking for answers. We have not stopped seeking the truth. We have asked both the GBI and the FBI to intervene in these cases. The GBI will not investigate a Sheriff unless he asks for this. The FBI does not investigate murders and it will not look at the evidence or witness tampering in this case from the Sheriff’s office. In short, the Sheriff in this community has no oversight from anyone.
We will continue our efforts to find the truth for both orphans. They are now nineteen and twenty-two years of age. They were nine and twelve years old at the time of their parent’s death. Alan was not allowed to see his grandchildren unless it was in a supervised setting with their grandmother present. She has maintained that her former husband, Alan Cox, had a sexual relationship with Kim. She did not trust him to not initiate the same behavior with his grandchildren.
We have no intention of giving up our search for the truth.
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