Russ Bynum

September 21, 2009 | Daily Report Online

SAVANNAH, Ga. AP - Dozens of volunteers spent a week helping police look for 6-year-old Christopher Michael Barrios after he vanished while playing in the mobile home park where the boy lived with his father and grandmother.Their search ended in shock, tears and outrage. On March 15, 2007, a Georgia game warden found the boy dead, his body wrapped in a plastic trash bag and dumped by a roadside about 3 miles from his home.

By RUSS BYNUM

4 minute read

September 03, 2013 | Daily Report Online

Monesa Coney bought her young sons a videogame console this summer to keep them from playing in her yard, where heavy rains are followed by foul-smelling liquid that bubbles up from the town's sewer system.

By Russ Bynum

6 minute read

January 12, 2010 | Daily Report Online

SAVANNAH, Ga. AP - Angry that the military planned to send him back to Iraq past his date to leave the military, a Fort Stewart soldier recorded a hip-hop song that blasts the Army and describes going on a shooting spree, an act that led his commanders to decide that the soldier posed a threat to his unit.The infantry soldier, Spc.

By RUSS BYNUM

4 minute read

July 25, 2007 | Daily Report Online

HOMERVILLE, Ga. AP - The sheriff got a $23,485 patrol car, the tax assessor got a $2,407 computer and Homerville City Hall got its carpets cleaned for $665 - all with the stroke of a judge's pen.As one of rural Clinch County's most powerful politicians, Superior Court Judge Brooks E. Blitch III has been generous over the years in ordering the county to spend money on new equipment, upgrades and repairs.

By Russ Bynum

6 minute read

May 02, 2007 | Daily Report Online

WAYCROSS, Ga. AP - In the week he's spent fighting the vast wildfire in southeast Georgia, Gino Fisher still can't get used to local residents stopping to shake his hand, pat him on the back and offer hot meals and snacks."For a few minutes, you don't feel like an inmate anymore," said Fisher, who's serving a five-year sentence for check forgery at Lee State Prison in Leesburg, about 120 miles east.

By Russ Bynum

4 minute read

August 31, 2009 | Daily Report Online

BRUNSWICK, Ga. AP - A frantic caller told authorities he had just come home to find several relatives apparently beaten to death and another barely breathing, according to a 911 tape released Monday from the weekend attack at a mobile home park in southeastern Georgia."My whole family is dead" screamed Guy Heinze Jr.

By RUSS BYNUM

4 minute read

April 19, 2007 | Daily Report Online

STATESBORO, Ga. AP - At the end of Act One, the tenor wearing a white suit and trademark red suspenders clutches his fat cigar in a smoldering rage."I'm not gonna put up with any social equality in this state as long as I'm governor," he sings in a dark, resonant voice. "We don't need no Negroes and white people taught together.

By Russ Bynum

4 minute read

September 21, 2011 | Daily Report Online

SAVANNAH, Ga. AP - Did Troy Anthony Davis deserve to be on Georgia's death row The answer depends on one's faith in the system and its many procedural hoops.Trial witnesses recanted what they'd sworn to police, and jurors even questioned their verdict. Activists, some of them death-penalty supporters, protested by the thousands that he was innocent - or at least that guilt was hopelessly shrouded in reasonable doubt.

By Allen G. Breed and Russ Bynum

10 minute read

February 10, 2009 | Daily Report Online

SAVANNAH, Ga. AP - Sporting a dragon tattoo on his forearm and skulls on both biceps, Cliff Cornell looks tough. But he dissolves into tears as he reflects on his return to the Army four years after he fled to Canada to avoid the war in Iraq."I'm nervous, scared," Cornell said, wiping puffy eyes beneath his sunglasses Monday at a Savannah hotel after a three-day bus ride from Seattle.

By RUSS BYNUM

4 minute read

January 11, 2013 | Daily Report Online

Even at age 81, Dr. James C. Metts Jr. liked to stay busy. By day, he treated some of Savannah's poorest patients at a downtown medical clinic. By night, or whenever police called, he examined dead bodies as the Chatham County coroner - an elected job that gave Metts a taste of the spotlight in the bestselling book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

By Russ Bynum

6 minute read