Prestiss Lamar Wells, identified in Georgia Supreme Court records as Prentiss Wells, was a 57-year-old Black man who was killed on February 13, 1992, after what began as an ordinary day in Newton County, Georgia, turned into a calculated robbery. Court records say Wells had bought a flea market stall months earlier and often carried substantial cash while buying used items to resell. About a month before his death, Joseph Martin Barnes and Tim Brown got to know him and sometimes helped him with errands. According to the evidence later upheld on appeal, the two men noticed Wells’ habit of carrying cash and talked about robbing him before the killing.
The day before the murder, Barnes and Brown armed themselves, with Brown buying a shotgun and Barnes buying a Davis Industries. 380 pistol. On February 13, Wells rode with them in Brown’s pickup truck after they helped him move a piano and took him to look at an old truck he was considering buying. At some point on a dirt road, Barnes demanded Wells’ money after seeing that Wells had $5,800 in cash visible in his pocket. Wells resisted, and the confrontation turned violent. Medical evidence described at trial showed that Wells suffered a brutal beating to the head and face before he was shot. He was hit with enough force to leave deep wounds, then shot twice in the torso. Crime-scene and medical testimony said he staggered about forty feet before collapsing, and then Barnes delivered a final contact shot to the back of his head. The court record is explicit that Wells was unarmed.
After the shooting, Barnes took the cash from Wells’ body and returned to the truck, telling Brown that they were both involved. The two men then fled, first stopping for dinner at Red Lobster and then at a pawn shop, where Barnes bought another handgun, a Bersa. 380, using money taken from Wells. Brown’s wife, Tonya Brown, was picked up along the way, and the group went to North Carolina, where Tonya rented an apartment for them. The flight did not last long. Police arrested Tim Brown in North Carolina roughly a week later, and the Davis Industries. 380 used in the killing was found in Brown’s truck. Barnes was then arrested separately in Young Harris, Georgia, while visiting a relative, and police found him carrying the Bersa pistol loaded and ready to fire in his coat pocket. After his arrest, Barnes told police he had shot Wells in self-defense.
That self-defense claim did not carry the day in court. Barnes was tried in 1993, convicted of malice murder, felony murder, and armed robbery, and sentenced to death for the murder, with a consecutive life sentence for the robbery. Tim Brown, the other man involved, pleaded guilty to felony murder and testified for the prosecution at Barnes’ trial, making him not just a suspect but a convicted co-defendant in the case. The Georgia Supreme Court later affirmed Barnes’s convictions, finding the evidence sufficient, but threw out the death sentence because the trial court had improperly limited mitigating evidence during the sentencing phase.
The case did not end there. After the death sentence was vacated and the matter returned for a new sentencing proceeding, Barnes and the State reached an agreement. In November 1999, Barnes accepted a sentence of life without parole in exchange for the State withdrawing its effort to seek the death penalty again. Later Georgia Supreme Court decisions recounted that history when Barnes tried, unsuccessfully, to challenge the sentencing agreement years afterward. So the record left by the courts shows a case that moved from robbery, to murder, to arrests across two states, to convictions, and finally to a permanent sentence that ensured Joseph Barnes would remain imprisoned for the killing of Wells, while Tim Brown’s guilty plea fixed his role as the second man criminally responsible for the crime.
