Editor’s Note: This story was updated to correct the date to February 2022 when a forensic psychologist testified that Tyberius Eaddy was no longer in need of inpatient state psychiatric care. The Current previously reported that testimony occurred in 2020.
Felicia and Tybre’ana Eaddy heaved two boxes of files onto a table and, page by page, spread hundreds of pages of government files that describe the horror that their family has endured for 14 years.
In early 2011 Tyberius Eaddy — Felicia’s brother and Tybre’ana’s father — was living in a relative’s house in Blackshear. Though he had no steady employment, he was often helping family members and doing odd jobs around the community as a gardener or mechanic.
Tyberius’ life fell apart that February, when he was arrested in Pierce County for allegedly assaulting a convenience store worker and stealing liquor. Instead of a timely trial, he got remanded to a state psychiatric hospital. For 175 months he has been involuntarily committed, court records show, often under heavy psychotropic medication, while state doctors have, over and over again, changed their minds about his mental condition.
In May, a state clinical psychologist testified at a court hearing that Tyberius was able to “converse appropriately” on certain topics. However, conversations about his legal case, the official said, cause him to “become delusional and the nature of his speech [becomes] disorganized.” This summer, the Pierce County District Attorney declined requests to drop charges against the now 49-year-old man, which include forgery, shoplifting and armed assault. A judge then extended his committal order.
The decision has added to the Eaddy family’s anguish, given that Tyberius’ initial arrest involved no eye witness and the inescapable reality that his involuntary confinement is approaching the maximum sentence for crimes for which he has never been convicted.
Due process is a cornerstone of American justice, something that provides people with the assurance that there is a set of procedures the government must follow before restricting certain unalienable rights — life, liberty and property. The government is supposed to give someone accused of a crime a chance for a fair hearing.
But what happens when the accused person is declared incompetent to stand trial — meaning the person is unable to understand the nature of the criminal proceedings — or to assist in his or her defense?
In Tyberius’ case, it means the two people who want to advocate for him are hamstrung. They have no access to Tyberius’ medical records, and they can’t contest the state’s findings about Tyberius’ mental state, because he has never given power of attorney to them — and the mental findings prevent him from ever doing so. That makes it near impossible to counter the DA’s charges or a local judge’s decision in Sept. 2022 to seal his case records.
‘He was fast… He was gifted. He was born with a high IQ. He wasn’t born with no cognitive deficiencies. He was very smart. He was very intelligent.’
Felicia Eaddy
That’s despite the fact, the women say, that the police reports that they have collected are full of inconsistencies. According to those records, witnesses, some of whom no longer live in Pierce County, never identified Tyberius at the scenes of the crimes. No DNA evidence was cited in court files to link him to the crime scenes. Meanwhile, one of the officers who arrested Tyberius was himself arrested and charged with bribery in Blackshear, according to court records.
Felicia says Pierce County prosecutors have blocked their family’s efforts to clear his name because they are too poor to hire a lawyer.
“We do not want his life wasted away because of some prejudice [and] bias,” she said.
The Waycross District Attorney’s office declined to comment. In court, the prosecutor has described Tyberius as a man who poses a danger to himself and the people of Blackshear. Blackshear Police Chief Chris Wright told The Current that he is unable to comment on any of Tyberius’ cases since they are “still technically pending prosecution.” Judge Jeffrey Kight who sealed the records did not respond to requests for comment.
The public defender assigned to Tyberius’ case and named in court documents did not respond to requests for comment. The Eaddy family told The Current that the public defender has also declined to tell them why he did not object to Tyberius’ records being sealed.
That the family has been able to collect two boxes of official records is a testament to what they say is lots of sweet talking and cajoling of court clerks and love for a man who they know as a kind father who enjoyed watching football and working as a handyman.
Felicia mentioned that growing up, Tyberius was known as the “up and coming Herschel Walker.”
“He was just that good. He was fast… He was gifted. He was born with a high IQ. He wasn’t born with no cognitive deficiencies. He was very smart. He was very intelligent,” She added.
The following timeline outlines the alleged crimes, mental health evaluations and court hearings that culminated in Tyberius’s arrest and committal in Georgia Regional Hospital-Savannah’s (GRHS) psychiatric ward. It is compiled from hundreds of court and police documents reviewed by The Current, as well as from interviews conducted separately by the news organization.
The allegations
From reviews of nine police reports and hundreds of pages of court documents, The Current has pieced together the police allegations against Tyberius.
On Feb. 10, 2011, shortly after 8 p.m. Tyberius allegedly tried to pay for a meal at Rocking Bear Restaurant with a check from Old Blackshear Bank. The officer who was called to the scene reported that Tyberius said that the check was from his aunt, who paid him to help clean around her house. Additional investigation produced a death certificate for Tyberius’ aunt dated almost a decade before.
Tyberius, however, was not arrested that evening.
Then, between Feb. 15 and Feb. 16, several other alleged crimes occurred in Blackshear, all of which police later accused Tyberius of committing.
Around 10:18 p.m. Feb. 15, Blackshear Patrol Officer Danny Bohannan responded to a burglar alarm at the Whistle Stop Package Store. There, he noticed that the front window had been broken. In his police report, the officer noted that the store’s owner, who arrived later at the scene, confirmed that two half-pint bottles of Hennessy were missing.
Two police officers were called back to the same liquor store after its alarm went off again. One of the responding officers reviewed the store’s security camera footage and told Detective Chris Wright that it showed a Black man reaching through the window and stealing alcohol. Wright took samples of blood left around the broken glass and on the floor. The first officer later identified the robber as Tyberius, based on a previous shoplifting call he’d responded to earlier that night where the same type of alcohol was taken. The police reports did not say how that identification took place.
Sometime later police were called to a Hispanic grocery store called Tienda Altmairano Store, after a cashier reported being knocked on the head by a Black man in dark clothing, according to an incident report filed by Detective Wright. While the cashier was bleeding on the ground, the man grabbed money from the register — an estimated $300 — before fleeing the store.
Around the same time, police were also called to Coastal Pawn, where the owner told Detective Chris Carter that a Black man had run into the store looking panicked and out of breath. The owner suspected the behavior was linked to a police car driving by with its lights and sirens on.
The owner said the man only seemed to calm down once the car had passed. The man then approached the owner and asked for $100 in cash in exchange for his ID. Police reports say the owner knew the man as Tyberius Eaddy. When the owner refused the demand for money, Tyberius allegedly backed up “like he was going to take some action,” according to a statement from the owner. The owner placed a hand on his gun and asked Tyberius to leave, which he did.
On Feb. 18 police arrested Tyberius on forgery charges for passing a bad check. Over the course of three months, Tyberius remained in detention and police added charges against him.
In March, police showed a collection of fuzzy and back-lit head shots of men to the Spanish-speaking grocery store cashier who had been assaulted as a photo lineup to identify her assailant. The cashier selected Tyberius from the photo spread. But there was no in-person line up. There was no indication in the police records about whether a translator was present.
Meanwhile, police also interviewed a witness who was outside the grocery store at the time of the alleged assault. That witness said she saw a Black man leaving a third store on a bicycle around the time of the Tienda assault. The witness said she had observed a Hispanic female pointing towards the Black man on the bicycle. That witness, however, failed to identify Tyberius when shown the same photo lineup.
It is unclear if anyone from the liquor store was ever asked to identify the shoplifter. In the court records collected by the Eaddy family, there is no record of police matching the blood from the broken window at the liquor store to Tyberius.
In May 2011, Clayton Culp, who was then a public defender in the Waycross Judicial Circuit and assigned to Tyberius’ case, ordered a mental health evaluation for his client. Tyberius at that time was found competent to stand trial.
Rather than go to trial, Tyberius was offered a plea deal, his family said. But he declined it, they told The Current. No existing court records show who was representing Tyberius at the time.
Although not part of the official court record, the documents collected by the Eaddy family included what appears to be what defense attorneys described as a standard plea offer in the region. The undated form reviewed by The Current had neither the name of a prosecutor nor defense counsel, nor the specific charges to be included in the plea. The form recommended a sentence of 25 years — 15 in prison and 10 on probation.
Committed to state mental hospital
Tyberius remained in the county jail until December 2011. County officials ordered a second mental evaluation that found him incompetent to stand trial. That state doctor said he was “restorable” — a diagnosis that meant under the right care he would be able to understand the charges and defend himself. That decision prompted his transfer to a state psychiatric hospital, Georgia Regional Hospital Savannah (GRHS).
For the next three years, Tyberius remained there. State medical officials prescribed multiple medications for him, including lithium, according to an annual review sent from GRHS to Judge Kight. After nine months in the unit, Tyberius was deemed competent for trial, but he was never moved from the psychiatric facility. His diagnosis was later changed to incompetent.
This cycle happened multiple times, until January 2015 when he was deemed incompetent and non-restorable, meaning he would never be able to stand trial. At this point, Tyberius was civilly committed to the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD), the agency that runs GRHS.
A 2016 mental evaluation said that Tyberius had schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder and a history of cocaine abuse.
When the alleged history of cocaine abuse was brought up years later in a court hearing, Felicia and Tybre’ana were taken aback. “We were like, ‘Wait a minute, this has never even been out, ever or even been mentioned,’ ” Tybre’ana said. Felicia confirmed that she’d never seen her brother use illegal recreational drugs.
In April 2022 Forensic Psychologist Dana Pitts testified in a hearing that Tyberius was no longer in need of inpatient care and recommended that he be moved to an outpatient facility.
Judge Jeffrey Kight of the Waycross Judicial Circuit denied the request and ordered Tyberius to remain at the psychiatric hospital. The court records show that the judge provided no reason for going against the medical recommendation.
The Eaddys said that Tyberius’ public defender has never pushed back against these rulings of incompetency or offered advice for how the family could challenge them.
‘We have these purported statutory protections … And there is often this pretty egregious disconnect between these purported rights and the experiences of people who are under criminal prosecution.’
Elizabeth taxel, clinical associate professor, UGA school of law
Elizabeth Taxel, Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, said one of the safeguards against indefinite committal ordered by a court is the Georgia regulation that requires annual reevaluation of those who have been put in state care.
Taxel said there is often a disconnect between rights that are meant to be afforded to defendants and the actions that actually take place in the courtroom. “He has the right to a hearing. He has the right to counsel. He has the right to hire an expert. He has the right to state witnesses, to cross examination and to try to convince the judge that he doesn’t need to be civilly committed.”
“We have these purported statutory protections,” Taxel said. “But what is actually happening in real life? What’s actually happening in practice? And there is often this pretty egregious disconnect between these purported rights and the experiences of people who are under criminal prosecution.”
The Eaddys’ efforts to find the truth
In the past few years, Felicia’s and Tybre’ana’s access to Tyberius has been sparse. They make occasional visits to him in the hospital, where they are increasingly dismayed at his worsening condition due to what they say are extremely high doses of medications that he has been prescribed.
Tybre’ana says she used to have phone calls with her father once or twice a week, but those communications have dropped off. At his most recent court hearing on May 14, Judge Kight reprimanded Tyberius for making multiple calls to his office regarding his cases, going so far as to “respectfully (demand) Mr. Eaddy to stop calling (his) office” and that his access to phones be more closely supervised.
Tybre’ana believes that hearing is the reason why she hears from her dad less. “After that request, I don’t hear from him on months end now. There’s no concrete evidence that that’s connected but in the sense of my brain … my dad himself doesn’t have as much access to the phones anymore.”
By 2022, Tybre’ana got more involved with her father’s defense after his public defender reprimanded her for insisting he work harder to help clear Tyberius’ name. “That’s when I knew, hey, this guy’s not on our team,” she said. “He’s not understanding. He did not want to answer any direct questions.”
She and her aunt then started collecting their own copies of documents about Tyberius’ case. That started a years-long effort to understand the system, and the charges against him, and battle to gain visiting rights to see him at the psychiatric hospital.
As she sifts through the hundreds of pages of police and court records, Tybre’ana can’t get over how flimsy the underlying evidence is that led her father getting locked up without being convicted of any crime. The case files they have collected contain no DNA evidence, no surveillance footage and contradictory witness testimony from locations that are less than a mile apart.
“How did he go from being at his home, to being arrested, to putting him into a hospital,” she said. “They have a search warrant here, but how did they obtain that, on what basis and why?”
‘How did he go from being at his home, to being arrested, to putting him into a hospital?”
Tybre’ana Eaddy
Public defenders in Georgia are notoriously overloaded with work. But some of the family’s most vocal criticism is reserved for Tyberius’ publicly funded counsel. They blame him for freezing them out of information, including notifications of court hearings like the one in May, where Tyberius was transported to Pierce County and no family member attended.
“He said he was lonely. He was all alone. Nobody was there. All these people against him,” Felicia said of Tyberius’ response to not seeing any family members in the courtroom during his hearing.
Adult criminal cases can require anywhere from two days to seven weeks of work, depending on case type, according to RAND’s National Public Defense Workload Study. High-severity cases, like those with a possible sentence of life without parole, require more time than parole violation cases.
Michael Schwartz, a defense attorney at New South Law in Savannah, said it’s possible that Tyberius’ lawyer was trying to provide the best defense for his client.
Schwartz, who reviewed the limited court documents obtained by The Current, said that there was a legitimate rationale whereby going to trial would not be in Tyberius’ best interest, given both the severity of the allegations and the difficulty at securing a jury of his peers. Blackshear has a total population of 3,506, according to 2020 Census Bureau data, while just over 700 people are Black.
If a public defender is “looking at this and he’s like, ‘If we go to trial in front of the juries that I know here, and he gets convicted of this stuff because he’s refusing to take a deal, we’re not looking at 25 to 10. We’re probably looking at something closer to life,’ ” Schwartz said. “The best thing for him is to be found not competent until the state stops caring about this prosecution, and then he gets to go home.”
The Eaddys have tried to have Tyberius’ current public defender taken off the case or sanctioned. They wrote to the judges in 2023 that the public defender’s lack of action was affecting Tyberius’s civil rights.
“The gravity of consequences arising from the actions of certain attorneys within the criminal justice system, allegedly pursuing their duties at the expense of innocence and those wrongly accused, cannot be understanded,” the family wrote in a September 2023 letter to the then-presiding judge.
The current public defender did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Sealed documents
It’s unclear just how long local prosecutors will keep this case open.
When the judge agreed to an order to seal Tyberius’ court records, the family felt they were out of options.
Not only have they lost access to any more court files, but also they have no access to Tyberius’ medical records.
Court records are typically sealed when the right to privacy outweighs the public’s right to have free access to information. This sealing applies to all interested parties, including his family, said Taxel, the UGA law professor.
The Eaddys succeeded in speaking with the public defender over the phone on June 30, asking him why he couldn’t get the charges dismissed due to the statutes of limitations or lack of evidence or witnesses.
They said he told them that would not be possible until Tyberius is found competent to stand trial. He added that the statute of limitations does not apply in this case because Tyberius was indicted within the legal time frame after arrest.
The public defender called them back days later, saying that he had spoken with Assistant DA Mark Anthony. The prosecutor confirmed that “understanding the seriousness of the charges, we do not want to dismiss the charges and we are not going to.”
‘…How can the hospital go from saying he’s competent to doing nothing? Because once you’re competent, you’re able to have a trial.’
tybre’ana eaddy
The Waycross DA’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Felicia added that she believes the conversation with the public defender only occurred because she contacted the public defender’s office and attempted to file a complaint against him for his inaction in Tyberius’ case only a few days prior.
More than anything, Tybre’ana and Felicia have a number of their questions in regards to the inconsistent mental health evaluations.
“My question is, how can the hospital go from saying he’s competent to doing nothing? Because once you’re competent, you’re able to have a trial,” Tybre’ana added.
It’s also unclear, the family said, how prosecutors could win a trial, if any new mental evaluation proved Tyberius was able to assist in his own defense.
The Hispanic grocery store no longer is in business, and it’s unclear where the cashier, the only person to have provided an ID of Tyberius, now lives.
At the Whistle Stop Package Store, one long time employee says that the police report of the burglary and shoplifting doesn’t match his recollection of events 14 years ago.
Umesh Patel told The Current that he wasn’t on duty when the Hennessy was stolen, but he remembered the broken window and the robbery. He said that occurred when another employee who no longer works at the store was on shift. That person worked during the day, not night, Patel said, which raises questions about the time frame of the robbery that was detailed in the police report.
Patel also remembered that the burglar had been someone known in the neighborhood, though he couldn’t recall a name.
In the past several years, Patel said that the store suffers from occasional shoplifting incidents, but that he doesn’t find it “worth it” to call the police when they occur since they’re so few and far between.
Meanwhile, the Eaddy family works to fill the large hole in their lives that Tyberius’ absence brings.
In the last several months they say they have noticed a decline in Tyberius’ health during the irregular visits they have with him at GRHS. During their last visit to see Tyberius in June, they said he was losing both weight and hair, and his skin was discolored and raw sections were showing.
They added that his mood can differ day by day due to being “forcibly medicated with high doses of toxic drugs.”
“That’s not my dad,” Tybre’ana said when looking at recent photos of him. She fondly recalls the memory of a tradition her and her dad shared — him always bringing her an iced honey bun whenever they saw each other.
Tyberius’ freedom has taken a more urgent turn this year since Tybre’ana was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Though she struggles to describe exactly how it would feel to have her father home, she knows that it “would be everything.”
Felicia, his sister, added, “He needs to be able to set the terms of his life.”
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