Members of the Rogers High School softball team, on which Chelsie Garner played outfield, gathered on the field late Tuesday to honor her memory. Brooke Dickey, Laken Owen, Kayla Benefield, Haley Miller, Haley Iron, Hope Kirk, Chasity Baker, Ashley Stovall Taylor Connelly, Caroline Skillern, Katie Kirk and Brianna Scott joined head coach Kim Green and assistant coaches Jessica Green and Kerry Childress at the impromptu memorial service. (News Courier/Kelly Kazek)

GREENHILL – Three days from now, with corsage in hand, the boy across the street planned to walk up to 16-year-old Chelsie Garner’s front porch to escort her to the Rogers High School prom.

Instead, he walked up to her front porch Tuesday morning to see why she failed to answer her telephone and found only death.

Inside the white, country home with a front-porch swing and a mighty oak in the yard in Greenhill, an unincorporated town 35 miles from Athens, lay the bodies of Chelsie; her 40-year-old mother, Tammy Morgan Garner; her visiting aunt, Karen Beaty of Lebanon, Ill.; and Beaty’s 11-year-old son, Bobby.

The four had been shot with a handgun around midnight Tuesday at Tammy Garner’s home at 7195 County Road 73, about 35 miles west of Athens.

Apparently enraged over an impending divorce, Chelsie’s father, Kevin Lee Garner, 45, shot the four family members — including his own sister and nephew who had come to Alabama to testify for Tammy in her divorce case.

After the carnage, Kevin drove to the home he and his wife and daughter once shared in Priceville, set fire to it and fatally shot himself in the chest, said Morgan County Chief Deputy Mike Corley.

Kevin was found dead about Tuesday afternoon on a wooded ridge about 200 yards south of the home at 187 Old Somerville Road.

Word of the murders traveled like falling dominoes through Greenhill, a tiny community where everyone knows one another. Students at the high school were shocked.

“I have never experienced anything like this in my 13 years here,” said Principal Tim Tubbs, who ordered the school locked down Tuesday morning because authorities believed Kevin was still at large.

“It was a real somber atmosphere today,” Tubbs said. “We are doing all we can to comfort and help the students understand the tragedy.”

Tubbs described Chelsie, who transferred to Rogers High from Priceville High last year, as a sweet, very personable young lady who played both volleyball and softball on the high school team.

“I can’t say enough nice about her,” he said.

Chelsie’s softball coach, Kim Green, said the teen fit in right away at Rogers. “She smiled constantly,” she said.

Green said Chelsie stressed to her teammates that they were a family.

“She will never be replaced. The girls decided this season belongs to her,” Green said. “We’re going to have an angel in the outfield.”

At the Greenhill home on Tuesday afternoon, an orange and white kitten played on the front steps while a black Labrador retriever snoozed by the back door. Amid a circle of yellow crime scene tape, investigators from the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, forensic lab in Huntsville, U.S. Marshals Office, Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Department and Killen Police Department walked in and out of the home collecting evidence.

Across the road in the home of Chelsie’s boyfriend, Casey Butler, the family of Tammy gathered along with friends and a minister.

Reed Canerday, whose daughter owns the home Tammy rented, said Casey found the bodies after going to the home Tuesday morning when Chelsie failed to answer her telephone and her car was still in the driveway. He looked through the glass in the front door, saw bodies and entered the home, Canerday said.



Divorce pending



Tammy filed for divorce in May because she said her husband, who she married in 1987 in Lauderdale County, was both physically and emotionally abusive and that he was extremely controlling and was becoming more so, according to her divorce petition.

The two had a hearing in Morgan County Circuit Court Monday and were scheduled to have a hearing at 9 a.m. today in Morgan County Circuit Court.

Kevin, who worked for NOVA in Decatur at the time the petition was filed, had requested a trial after his wife petitioned for divorce last year, which is why the process had taken nearly a year.

Tammy believed her husband was violent but she could not have foreseen Tuesday’s cruel end. It was after Monday’s hearing that Kevin leased a white, 2009 Hyundai Sonata from Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Decatur. At some point, he drove the rental car to Greenhill and parked it about a half-mile from his wife’s home on County Road 73. Sometime around midnight, authorities believe Kevin entered the home and killed the four family members. He fled in his wife’s green, 1993 Subaru Legacy, one official said.

Corley said fire investigators believe Kevin set fire to the vehicle and the couple’s home in Priceville sometime after the shootings. Priceville firefighters were called to the home about 2:59 a.m. Tuesday.

When authorities learned of the deaths of the four in Greenhill, they did not know Kevin’s whereabouts. When fire investigators checked the charred Priceville home for Kevin’s body and could not find it, they had to consider that he might still be alive and at large, Corley said. Believing he could be a danger to others, law-enforcement officials issued all-points bulletins throughout the morning and early afternoon for the Subaru Legacy, then a Ford F-150 pickup and then the rented Hyundai. They locked down Priceville school because a faculty member was slated to testify in the Garner divorce proceedings.

“We didn’t want him thinking there was another witness or someone he had it in for going to a vehicle or going to get on a school bus,” Corley said.

The Sheriff’s Department also offered to escort the judge from the courthouse.

Corley was uncertain Tuesday night how Kevin’s body was found. He said it was spotted near the house about 3:45 p.m. By an Alabama State Trooper helicopter pilot who was flying over the property in search of the body.

As Morgan County deputies, Priceville police officers and others worked at the scene in Priceville Tuesday night, Corley said he had never seen a murder like this in his 30-plus years in law-enforcement.

“Not where an individual lost it — where he actually murdered four family members,” he said.