By DON FLETCHER
News Staff Writer
An Alabama man, found guilty by a federal jury earlier this year, was sentenced to 32 years in federal prison on charges related to a brutal, violent 2022 carjacking that ended with the arrest of the suspect at an abandoned rural Escambia County house where he had threatened to kill his victim and leave her remains.
According to a news release issued by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF), United States District Court Judge Kristi K. Dubose ordered the federal prison term for 49-year-old Kenneth Lamar Douglas of Red Level, who was convicted during his April trial of carjacking, brandishing a firearm during the commission of a violent crime, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Court documents include that Douglas was staying at the victim’s residence in Andalusia overnight on March 7, 2022, and on March 8, he “threatened her and physically struck her, knocking her to the floor in her kitchen.” Douglas, a heavy user of methamphetamine, was trying to arrange the purchase from a local supplier of more meth.
He put the victim inside her car with him and began his search for drugs. He came up empty at the first place they stopped, and when the woman, who was driving her own car by then, refused to go to a second dealer’s house with him, Douglas “struck the victim in the side of the neck and head with such force that she was knocked unconscious.”
According to trial testimony, when she regained consciousness, the woman was “upside down in the passenger’s seat,” bleeding profusely from gashes to her head and mouth.
Douglas drove her to an abandoned house in a heavily wooded section of Escambia County, where the victim told authorities he threatened that he “was going to kill her and bury her in the backyard where no one could find her.”
She pleaded with him not to do so, and when they arrived at the abandoned house, the woman gave him all the money she had and drove back to Andalusia, to a friend’s workplace near the hospital.
The friend took her to the local hospital, where medical staff reported her eyes were almost swollen shut, and she had cuts and bruises all over her face and a large gash on the top of her head. Her face and head were “literally covered in blood;” her lips were swollen and cut on the inside of her mouth; she had a chipped tooth, and her nose was broken in three places, each of which were displaced.
X-rays showed she had blood in her sinuses from repeated blows to her head; she had a large bloody scrape on her leg, and she had a sprained wrist from the initial attack.
Andalusia police began a search for Douglas and, once dark set in, they and several Escambia County deputies surrounded the abandoned house in Escambia County, which had no electricity or plumbing. A generator ran a light inside the house, and authorities could see Douglas standing beside the light.
A deputy approached the open front door, and Douglas pointed the shotgun at him, causing the posse to take cover. As local deputies and Andalusia investigators tried to talk him out of the house, Douglas slipped away under cover of darkness.
The shotgun was recovered from inside the house, along with paraphernalia used for intravenous meth abuse. DNA testing showed the victim’s blood in the grooves of the gun’s butt stock.
The jury found Douglas guilty of all three counts charged in the indictment, and Dubose sentenced him to a total of 32 years in prison, consisting of 25 years on the carjacking charge, 10 years on the felon in possession of a weapon charge (to run concurrently with the first sentence), and 7 years for brandishing a firearm during a violent crime, which will begin after the sentences on the other two counts have been satisfied.
Douglas will also serve a five-year term of supervised release after he is freed from prison, the judge ruled.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gloria Bedwell prosecuted the case, which was jointly investigated by ATF, the Andalusia Police Department and the Escambia County (Ala.) Sheriff’s Office.