Murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom
2007 crime in Tennessee
Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., aged 23, were a couple from Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. They were kidnapped on the evening of January 6, 2007, when Christian's vehicle was carjacked. The couple were taken to a rental house. Both of them were raped, tortured, and murdered. Four black men and one black woman were arrested, charged, and convicted in the case. In 2007, a grand jury indicted Letalvis Darnell Cobbins, Lemaricus Devall Davidson, George Geovonni Thomas, and Vanessa Lynn Coleman on counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder. Also in 2007, Eric DeWayne Boyd was indicted by a federal grand jury of being an accessory to a carjacking, resulting in serious bodily injury to another person and misprision of a felony. In 2018, Boyd was indicted on state-level charges of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder.
Four of the five defendants (Eric Boyd, Letalvis Cobbins, Lemaricus Davidson, and George Thomas) had multiple prior felony convictions. After a jury trial, Davidson was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.