Georgia executes inmate convicted of Hall County murders

A Georgia inmate convicted of a double murder in Hall County in 1994 was executed Thursday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.

The death sentence against Scotty Garnell Morrow was carried out at 9:38 p.m., according to the Georgia Attorney General’s Office. He was the 50th inmate to be put to death in Georgia by lethal injection. 

Department of Corrections officials said Morrow accepted a final prayer and recorded a final statement. 

He had requested a last meal of a hamburger with mayonnaise, two chicken and waffle meals, a pint of butter pecan ice cream, a bag of buttered popcorn, two all-beef franks and a large lemonade.

Morrow was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1999 for the murders of Barbara Ann Young and Tonya Rochelle Woods. According to a Georgia Supreme Court summary of the case, Young and Morrow had dated for a number of months in 1994, but she broke up with him because of abusive behavior.

On Dec. 29, 1994, after a phone conversation, Morrow drove to Young’s home, entered without permission and found Young with two friends, Tonya Woods and LaToya Horne. Two of Young’s children, ages 5 years old and 8 months, were also present.

During an argument in the kitchen in which Woods told Morrow to leave, Morrow pulled a 9 millimeter pistol and shot Woods in the abdomen and Horne in the arm. Morrow then chased Young down the hallway, caught her in the bedroom and beat her in the head and face before she was able to briefly escape back to the hallway, where he grabbed her hair and shot her in the head.

According to the summary, the 5-year-old witnessed his mother’s death from his hiding place in another bedroom.

Morrow returned to the kitchen and shot Woods and Horne again. While Woods had been paralyzed by the shot to the abdomen, the medical examiner in the case theorized she was probably still conscious when the fatal shot was fired.

Horne was shot two more times in the face and arm but managed, after Morrow had left, to get to her feet and run to a neighbor’s home. Horne and Young’s 5-year-old both identified Morrow as the shooter, and he admitted he shot the victims because he “wanted (Woods) to shut up.”