Donnie Sanders Cheney appeals his conviction of one count of theft by receiving, arguing that the State failed to prove the identity of the item’s owner, failed to prove the item was stolen, and failed to prove he ever possessed it. For the reasons that follow, we affirm. Cheney was indicted on 15 counts of theft by receiving various pieces of heavy equipment that were discovered on his property or at his friend’s racetrack, including a dump truck, trailers, and logging equipment. At trial, Cheney’s employee Donnie Walker, who lived in a trailer on Cheney’s 700-acre farm, admitted stealing the equipment over a period of several years and placing it in Cheney’s equipment repair shop or elsewhere on his property. He explained that he thought he might go into business for himself one day and use the stolen goods, but most of the equipment had been sitting for so long that trees had grown up through it. Walker initially told Cheney that a friend of his needed to store some equipment until he became “straight” with the IRS, and Cheney said that was fine as long as it was not stolen. After that Walker kept bringing in more stolen equipment and leaving it on Cheney’s property, which was messy and already contained numerous pieces of equipment belonging to Cheney and his neighbors. He took the equipment from the side of the road, from job sites, and from farmers’ fields. He stopped stealing when he thought he had enough, and simply left it all on Cheney’s property instead of selling or using it. He pled guilty to one count of theft by receiving stolen property, specifically a “Lowboy trailer.”
A witness testified that he owned a grading company and had previously employed Walker in November 2004 at a site in Milledgeville. In response to the State’s question whether the witness had been using a trench packer that looked like the one pictured in State’s Exhibit 3, the witness replied, “I don’t know what it looked like. I had one rented, but never looked at it.” He had rented the tool from Nef Tool Rental, which failed to pick it up when it was supposed to and when it finally came to get it the tool was gone.
