A former inmate at Augusta State Medical Prison is on trial this week for the brutal murder of his cellmate, Terry Bennett.
Deontae Lashun Holsey, 29, was in the Augusta prison for financial fraud in 2021, when he is accused of violently attacking the 43-year-old Bennett, whose wrists and ankles were bound.
Expert witness Andrew Koopmeiners, who was then a Georgia Bureau of Investigation medical examiner, testified Wednesday in Columbia County Superior Court Judge Barry Fleming’s court about the severity of Bennett’s wounds.
He determined Bennett died from blunt force trauma inflicted using a hard plastic meal tray with “quite a lot of force” to his head.
Curves on the tray matched several of the approximately 40 lacerations on Bennett’s face and scalp, Koopmeiners testified. His nose and several of his facial and skull bones were fractured, he said.
Bennett also had what appeared to be ligature marks on his neck and wrist and broken ribs on both sides, but a lack of defensive wounds, he testified.
Jurors were shown graphic photos from the crime scene and autopsy during the second day of Holsey’s trial Wednesday. Koopmeiners was the third of five witnesses to testify for the state, and two more were expected to testify Thursday.
Prison gang sergeant Cynthia Prescott testified Bennett was “clearly deceased” when she was called to the men’s bloody cell. She said Holsey “walked just fine” after the incident, and that plastic meal trays weren’t supposed to be left in inmate rooms after they ate.
Holsey is represented by Sean Gamble. The prosecution is being led by Alejandro Pascual.
Holsey was granted a $150,000 bond in 2022 in the case because he hadn’t been indicted within 90 days of being charged. His attorney at the time argued he had no violent criminal history and that the medical prison is a “murder factory.”
Doubts about safety at the medical and other state prisons have dominated headlines for years.
Authorities said Roderick Hayes, 29, died in May 2024 after a guard allowed him and two other inmates into a cell to fight, according to prior reports.
Complicating prosecutions at the state prison is its location on the Richmond-Columbia county line near Grovetown.
Prosecutors must determine in which county a crime occurred to decide where to prosecute it.