Georgia · McDuffie County · Crime & Courts

Mateo Santos Pinkston: Murder Charge, McDuffie County, GA

WRDW reports that Mateo Santos Pinkston is listed in McDuffie County jail records as arrested Wednesday by the sheriff’s office and charged with murder, two counts of aggravated assault, and a weapons count. No victim is named. No date, time or place of the alleged crime is given. The station says it is working to learn more. He has been charged and convicted of nothing.

What WRDW reported, in full

The entire published account of this arrest is four sentences long, and all four are reproduced here rather than summarized, because summarizing four sentences is how a summary becomes longer than its source.

The dateline and the first sentence: “THOMSON, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - A murder suspect has been arrested in McDuffie County, according to jail records.”

The second: “Mateo Santos Pinkston is listed as being arrested Wednesday by the McDuffie County Sheriff’s Office.”

The third, which carries the charges: “He’s charged with murder, two counts of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm or knife during commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies, according to jail records.”

And the fourth, which is the station describing its own position: “We’re working to learn more about the murder case.”

The story is credited to Staff and published Aug. 12, 2026 at 6:11 p.m. EDT. There is no named reporter, no quoted official, no sheriff’s office statement and no court document behind it. There is a booking record and a newsroom reading it.

Four sentences is the whole record

This page is unusual and it says so at the top rather than hiding it. Most of what follows is general Georgia procedure, because the incident record is four sentences and no amount of writing will make it five.

What that means for a reader who came here for the story: there is no story yet in the ordinary sense. There is a name, three charges, an agency, a county and a day of the week. Everything a person would actually want to know — who died, when, where, how, and why the state believes this man is responsible — is absent from the record compiled for this page.

The temptation on a page like this one is to fill the gap, and filling the gap is exactly how a site like this gets something wrong that it can never take back. So the gaps are printed as gaps.

The remainder of this page does two things. It states precisely what is and is not established, and it explains the Georgia process this matter is now inside — what a charge is, what a booking record is, how a case reaches a grand jury, how bond works on a murder charge, and how to get the records yourself. That material is general and it is labeled general everywhere it appears.

Nothing in the procedural sections is a statement about Mateo Santos Pinkston, about any victim, or about any evidence. It is the shape of the system, not the contents of this case.

What “according to jail records” actually means

WRDW attributes both the arrest and the charges to jail records, twice, and that phrase is doing real work.

• A jail booking record is a custody record. It shows who is being held, when they were booked in, and what charges were entered at intake. It is maintained by the sheriff’s office that runs the jail
• It is not a statement by the agency. No spokesperson wrote it, nobody stood at a podium, and there is no narrative attached to it. A booking line is a data entry
• It is not an indictment, and it is not a prosecutor’s charging decision. A district attorney reviews a case after arrest and may charge differently, charge less, add counts, or decline entirely
• Booking charges change. Between intake and indictment, counts are routinely amended, consolidated or dropped, and a page built on intake charges is a snapshot of one moment
• It is a strong record of one thing: that a person is in custody, on those listed charges, as of that entry. That is genuinely worth publishing, and it is also the limit of what it proves

A newsroom reporting from jail records rather than from an agency statement is being transparent about its sourcing, which is why this page repeats the attribution instead of quietly upgrading it to “the sheriff’s office said.” The sheriff’s office has not said anything in the record compiled for this page.

Charged, not convicted

Mateo Santos Pinkston has been charged. He has not been convicted of anything, and no court has found any fact in this matter.

Under O.C.G.A. § 16-1-5, every person is presumed innocent until proved guilty, and no person shall be convicted of a crime unless each element of such crime is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not a courtesy sentence at the bottom of a page. It is the rule that governs everything above it.

What an arrest establishes is that an officer had a basis to take someone into custody. Where an arrest is on a warrant, a judicial officer found probable cause — a screening standard that sits far below the standard a jury applies at trial.

So this page narrates nothing. There is no sentence here saying Mateo Santos Pinkston shot anyone, was anywhere, or did anything, because no source cited on this page says any of those things. What the record supports is a claim about what the state has done, not a claim about what happened.

No defense account exists in the record compiled for this page. No attorney is named for him, and no statement from him or on his behalf appears anywhere. That absence is worth stating, because a page listing three serious charges with no answering voice is showing one half of a matter that has barely started.

What is not established, itemized

The absences are the story here, so they are listed rather than glossed. Every line below is a thing this page could have invented and did not.

• No victim. Nobody who died is named, described, aged or counted in anything cited here
• No date of the alleged offense. The only date in the record is the arrest listing
• No time of day
• No location beyond the county. No address, no road, no subdivision, no business, and no city — the Thomson dateline is the newsroom’s locator for a county story, not a statement that anything happened in Thomson
• No manner of death. The weapons count references a firearm or a knife, which is the statute’s own either-or phrasing, not a description of anything
• No relationship between anyone involved
• No motive
• No other people arrested, sought, injured or present
• No prosecutor, no judicial circuit named, no court date
• No bond information, sought, set or denied
• No age or hometown for Mateo Santos Pinkston
• No prior record. This page does not research or publish anyone’s criminal history
• No photograph. No booking image appears on this page

That list is longer than the source article, and printing it is the honest alternative to writing around it.

The three charges, one at a time

WRDW’s wording is reproduced exactly, then explained in general terms. The station writes that he is charged with “murder, two counts of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm or knife during commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies, according to jail records.”

• Murder — one count, as listed. The record does not say whether it is charged as malice murder or felony murder, and this page does not choose
• Aggravated assault — two counts. The record does not say what either alleges or whom either concerns
• Possession of a firearm or knife during commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies — one count. That long phrase is the Georgia offense’s own name, not a description of a weapon

Three charges is not three incidents. Georgia prosecutors routinely stack counts arising from a single event, and the number of counts on a booking sheet says nothing about how many things happened.

The sections that follow explain what each offense is under Georgia law. They are general background. None of them is a statement about what is alleged here, because the record does not say what is alleged here.

Murder under Georgia law

General background. Murder in Georgia is O.C.G.A. § 16-5-1, and the section contains two distinct theories that carry the same name.

• Malice murder is causing the death of another human being unlawfully and with malice aforethought, express or implied. Malice is express where there is a deliberate intention unlawfully to take a life, manifested by external circumstances capable of proof; it is implied where no considerable provocation appears and all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart
• Felony murder is causing the death of another human being while in the commission of a felony, irrespective of malice. Intent to kill is not an element
• Both are murder, and prosecutors commonly charge both theories for a single death. Charging both does not allege two deaths, and Georgia does not permit sentencing twice for one death on both theories
• The punishment range on a murder conviction is death, imprisonment for life without parole, or imprisonment for life

Nothing in the record compiled for this page says which theory the murder count here rests on, or whether the question has been reached at all. A booking entry that says “murder” does not distinguish between them.

Aggravated assault, and why there are two counts

General background. Aggravated assault is O.C.G.A. § 16-5-21. Under subsection (a), a person commits the offense when he or she assaults another:

• With intent to murder, to rape, or to rob
• With a deadly weapon or with any object, device, or instrument which, when used offensively against a person, is likely to or actually does result in serious bodily injury
• With any object, device, or instrument which, when used offensively against a person, is likely to or actually does result in strangulation
• By discharging a firearm from within a motor vehicle toward a person or persons, without legal justification

The base punishment in subsection (b) is imprisonment for not less than one nor more than 20 years, with enhanced ranges in later subsections for particular circumstances.

Why two counts might exist is a question this page cannot answer and does not attempt to. Two counts can reflect two different people, two separate acts against one person, or two legal theories applied to the same conduct. The record compiled for this page contains none of that detail.

What matters for a reader is the negative: two counts of aggravated assault is not evidence that two people were hurt. Anyone reading it that way is reading something into a booking sheet that is not there.

The firearm-or-knife count

General background. The charge WRDW lists corresponds to O.C.G.A. § 16-11-106, which addresses having a firearm, or a knife with a blade of three inches or more, on or within arm’s reach during the commission of or the attempt to commit certain felonies. The enumerated felonies include crimes against a person, unlawful entry into a building or vehicle, theft, and specified drug offenses.

• It is a separate offense from whatever felony it attaches to, charged in addition rather than instead
• A first conviction carries confinement for five years, and the statute directs that the sentence run consecutively to any other sentence — meaning it is added on rather than served alongside
• A subsequent conviction carries ten years, which the statute does not permit to be suspended or probated
• The statute’s own phrasing is “firearm or knife,” which is why the charge name is worded that way on a booking sheet. It is not a statement that either weapon was involved in this matter

Nothing cited here says what weapon, if any, is alleged. Reading “firearm” out of a statutory offense name and reporting it as a fact about this case would be exactly the kind of small invention that ends up as a correction.

Counts are not a body count

This deserves its own section because it is the most common way a thin arrest story gets misread.

A count is a unit of accusation, not a unit of harm. Prosecutors and booking clerks structure charges around legal elements. One event routinely produces four, six or nine counts, and a case with a single victim can carry a longer charge list than a case with several.

So the four counts on this booking sheet — murder, two aggravated assaults and one weapons count — establish that four accusations were entered at intake. They do not establish how many people were involved, how many were hurt, or how many died.

Nothing cited on this page says anyone other than the person named was hurt, and nothing says anyone was not. Both of those are unknown, and both are left unknown here.

The same caution applies to the word “suspect.” WRDW’s first sentence uses it. A suspect is a person the state suspects. It is a description of the state’s posture, not of the person.

What this page will not connect this to

This page does not link this arrest to any other incident, anywhere.

Other things happen in the same county. A county has traffic deaths, fires, arrests and investigations, and several can land on the same calendar day without any relationship to one another. Nothing in the record compiled for this page connects this arrest to any other matter in McDuffie County or anywhere else in Georgia.

Proximity is not evidence. Same county is not a connection. Same week is not a connection. Same category of offense is not a connection. A reader who arrives having seen two McDuffie County headlines in one day should treat them as two unrelated items unless a source says otherwise, and no source cited here says otherwise.

The reason this rule is written down rather than merely followed is that a false link between two cases does damage in both directions: it attaches a stranger’s death to a defendant who has nothing to do with it, and it attaches a defendant to a family that has never heard the name.

If a connection ever exists, it will come from an agency or a court, not from a coincidence of geography, and it is not on this page.

Where: McDuffie County and Thomson

The only place established in the record compiled for this page is the county. WRDW says the arrest was in McDuffie County and carries a Thomson, Ga. dateline.

A dateline is a newsroom convention, naming the place a story is centered on. For a county-wide story a station will ordinarily use the county seat, and that is not the same as saying an event happened there. This page does not treat the dateline as a location for the alleged offense.

McDuffie County is in east central Georgia, west of Augusta along the Interstate 20 corridor. Thomson is the county seat and has its own police department, which is a separate agency from the sheriff’s office.

The county is small enough that a name travels fast in it, which is a reason for more care in what gets published, not less.

A caution about searching. Thomson is a common place name — there is a Thomson in Illinois, among others — and the McDuffie surname is widespread across the South. A search works with “McDuffie County GA” or “Thomson GA” in it.

No address, no road, no coordinates and no map appear on this page, because nothing cited here supplies any of them and a map drawn from a county name is decoration, not information.

Which agency made the arrest, and which ones are not named

One agency appears in the record compiled for this page: the McDuffie County Sheriff’s Office, named in jail records as the arresting agency, per WRDW.

• A sheriff’s office is a county agency, and in Georgia it also runs the county jail. So the same agency is both the listed arresting agency and the custodian of the booking record the story is built from
• The Thomson Police Department is a city agency and is not named in anything cited here. This page does not place it in this matter
• The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is not named in anything cited here. GBI involvement in a county homicide is common and is also not something to assume
• No district attorney and no judicial circuit is named in anything cited here
• No coroner and no medical examiner is named in anything cited here

Agencies are not interchangeable, and a page that guesses at which one is handling a case sends readers to the wrong phone number and misstates who is accountable for what.

Where our sources differ

A comparison table with one column filled is itself the finding. This site publishes the table anyway, because showing that a second column is empty is more honest than leaving the reader to assume it is full.

One newsroom stands behind this page

The count is one. A single story from WRDW, an Augusta television station owned by Gray Media, credited to Staff, published Aug. 12, 2026 at 6:11 p.m. EDT. The station shares its byline with WAGT, and Gray Media is counted once across all of its stations.

There is no government release behind this page. No sheriff’s office statement, no district attorney announcement, no GBI release and no court filing appears in the record compiled for this page.

There is no second newsroom. Nothing on this page is corroborated by anyone, and this page does not imply that it is.

What that means practically: if the booking record was entered wrong, or read wrong, this page carries it wrong. That is the honest risk profile of a story sourced to one jail log, and it is stated rather than buried.

It also means the charge list here is the intake list. Between a booking screen and an indictment, counts change. Nothing on this page should be treated as the final shape of a prosecution.

What a charge is not

General background, and the reason this page reads the way it does.

• A charge is not a conviction. It is an accusation that the state has to prove to twelve jurors beyond a reasonable doubt
• A charge is not a finding of fact. No judge has weighed evidence, and probable cause is a screening standard, not a verdict
• A charge is not a narrative. It contains no story, no motive and no sequence of events, and a page that supplies one has left its sources behind
• A charge is not permanent. Counts are amended, reduced, added and dismissed routinely between arrest and trial
• A charge is not a description of a person. It describes what the state alleges, for one alleged episode, at one moment in a process
• A charge is not a reason to publish a photograph, a home address, an employer or a family member, and none appears here

Everything on this page is written to that standard, which is why it contains no sentence describing anything Mateo Santos Pinkston is said to have done.

First appearance and the 72-hour rule

General Georgia procedure, not a description of anything that has happened in this matter.

Under O.C.G.A. § 17-4-26, every law enforcement officer arresting under a warrant shall exercise reasonable diligence in bringing the person arrested before the judicial officer authorized to examine, commit, or receive bail, and in any event to present the person arrested before a committing judicial officer within 72 hours after arrest. The statute also requires that the accused be notified as to when and where the commitment hearing is to be held, and provides that an arrested person who is not notified before the hearing of the time and place of it shall be released.

• A first appearance is short. The person is told what the charges are, told about the right to counsel, and told about bond, which on a murder charge a magistrate cannot set
• A commitment hearing is different and comes later. A judge there decides only whether probable cause exists to bind a case over, not whether anyone is guilty
• Neither proceeding is a trial, and neither produces a finding of guilt

Nothing in the record compiled for this page says whether any hearing has occurred in this matter, and this page does not assume that one has.

How a case reaches a grand jury in Georgia

General procedure. An arrest is the beginning of a felony case, not the middle of one.

• The investigating agency completes a file and delivers it to the district attorney for the judicial circuit
• The district attorney decides what to charge, which may differ from what a booking sheet says, and may include declining to proceed
• A grand jury considers an indictment. It applies probable cause, hears only the state’s presentation, and its proceedings are secret. The fact that a grand jury is considering a case is frequently not public until an indictment is returned
• An indictment is not a finding of guilt. It is a decision that a case may proceed to trial
• A felony is tried in superior court, before a jury of twelve, and a verdict must be unanimous

Under O.C.G.A. § 17-7-50, any person who is arrested for a crime and who is refused bail shall, within 90 days after the date of confinement, be entitled to have the charge against him or her heard by a grand jury having jurisdiction over the accused person. The statute allows the superior court one extension of up to 90 additional days in a case where the death penalty is sought, on a motion by the district attorney and a showing of good cause at a hearing. If no grand jury considers the charge in the applicable period, the accused is entitled to have bail set upon application to the court.

No indictment appears in anything cited on this page, and an announcement of charges from a booking record is not one.

Bond in a Georgia murder case

General background. Nothing in the record compiled for this page says whether bond has been sought, set or denied in this matter.

The governing provision is O.C.G.A. § 17-6-1, which provides that a list of serious offenses is bailable only before a judge of the superior court. Murder is on that list, along with treason, rape, aggravated sodomy, armed robbery, home invasion in the first degree, aircraft hijacking and hijacking a motor vehicle in the first degree, aggravated child molestation, aggravated sexual battery, certain drug offenses, aggravated stalking, and kidnapping, arson, aggravated assault or burglary where a defendant has certain prior convictions.

In plain terms, a magistrate cannot release a person charged with murder in Georgia. Only a superior court judge can consider it, and that judge weighs risk of flight, danger to the community or to any person or property, risk of intimidating witnesses, and risk of committing a felony while released.

A detention decision is not a verdict. Time spent in pretrial custody is separate from any sentence a court might impose after a conviction, and being held is not evidence of anything.

How to get records in McDuffie County

Different offices hold different pieces, and a request sent to the wrong one comes back empty.

• The McDuffie County Sheriff’s Office runs the jail and holds booking records. It is also the listed arresting agency in this matter
• The incident report from the underlying investigation is a separate record held by the investigating agency, and an open homicide file is routinely withheld in full
• Requests are made under the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. § 50-18-70 and the sections that follow it. Under O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71 an agency must respond within a reasonable amount of time not to exceed three business days, and where responsive records exist but are not available in that window the agency provides a description of such records and a timeline for their delivery
• If an agency withholds, subsection (d) requires it to notify the requester of the specific legal exemption it is relying on, and to give a cost estimate where the estimated cost will exceed $25
• Copying is capped at ten cents per page for letter or legal size documents, with search and retrieval charged at no more than the prorated hourly salary of the lowest-paid full-time employee capable of doing the work, and no charge for the first quarter hour
• Court filings live with the clerk of superior court, not with an investigating agency. Once a case is indicted, the clerk becomes the custodian and filings are generally public
• Identify the matter precisely. With no incident date and no location established, the workable identifiers are the name Mateo Santos Pinkston and the August 2026 booking

The Local Alert has not obtained any record in this matter — no booking record, no incident report, no warrant and no court file. Everything on this page comes from the single account listed at the bottom.

Victim resources in Georgia

General information for anyone in Georgia. No victim is identified in the record compiled for this page, so nothing in this section is addressed to a particular family.

• Georgia’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, administered through the state’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, can help with funeral and burial costs, counseling and certain other expenses for family members of a homicide victim. It has deadlines and generally requires that the crime was reported to law enforcement
• Georgia’s crime victims’ rights laws give a homicide victim’s family standing to be notified of proceedings, including bond hearings, and to be heard at certain stages. That only works if the prosecutor’s office has current contact information
• Victim-witness advocates work inside district attorneys’ offices and exist to explain what stage a case is at and what a hearing means. The service is free and chronically underused
• An autopsy report is a separate record from a police report and follows its own release rules, frequently withheld while a prosecution is pending
• A death certificate is what banks, insurers and employers ask for, and it always takes more copies than anyone expects
• Criminal and civil tracks are separate. A criminal case belongs to the state; a wrongful death claim belongs to a family and does not depend on a conviction
• Attention: the days after a homicide are exactly when uninvited approaches arrive, by phone and at the door. Nobody is obligated to sign anything, and nothing has to be decided that week

The Local Alert is not a law enforcement agency, not a coroner’s office and not a law firm, and cannot tell any individual what to do.

What we don’t know yet

Nothing above is filled in by inference. This page records what one newsroom established as of the timestamp at the bottom, and it does not revisit itself. For the current status of an arrest or a custody matter, the McDuffie County Sheriff’s Office is the agency named in the record.

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Frequently asked questions

Who is Mateo Santos Pinkston?
A man listed in McDuffie County jail records as arrested by the McDuffie County Sheriff's Office and held on a murder charge, according to WRDW. No age, no hometown and no other identifying information appears in the record compiled for this page, and none is supplied here. He has been charged and convicted of nothing.

What is Mateo Santos Pinkston charged with?
WRDW writes it this way: “He's charged with murder, two counts of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm or knife during commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies, according to jail records.” That is the station's exact wording and the entire charge list in the record compiled for this page. A charge is an accusation the state has to prove, not a finding.

Who was killed?
Nothing in the record compiled for this page names a victim, gives an age, or says anything at all about who died. WRDW does not name anyone. This page does not name a victim, does not describe one, and does not guess. A murder charge establishes what the state has accused someone of, not who the accusation concerns.

When and where did the alleged crime happen?
Not established. WRDW gives no date for the underlying incident, no time, no address, no road and no city beyond the Thomson, Ga. dateline on the story and the statement that the arrest was in McDuffie County. This page publishes no location beyond the county, because no source cited here supplies one.

When was he arrested?
WRDW writes that Mateo Santos Pinkston “is listed as being arrested Wednesday by the McDuffie County Sheriff's Office,” attributing that to jail records. The story published Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 6:11 p.m. EDT, and August 12, 2026 fell on a Wednesday. The arrest date and the date of the alleged offense are two different things, and no source cited here gives the second one.

Which agency arrested him?
The McDuffie County Sheriff's Office, according to jail records as reported by WRDW. That is a county law enforcement agency. Nothing in the record compiled for this page names the Thomson Police Department, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Georgia State Patrol or any other agency, and this page does not place any of them in this case. Agencies are not interchangeable.

Has he been convicted of anything?
No. He has been charged. Under O.C.G.A. § 16-1-5, every person is presumed innocent until proved guilty, and no person shall be convicted of a crime unless each element of such crime is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. No court has found any fact in this matter, and nothing on this page describes Mateo Santos Pinkston as having done anything, because no source cited here narrates any act.

Does two counts of aggravated assault mean there were two victims?
Nothing cited here says. Counts are how a prosecutor structures accusations, and two counts can reflect two people, two separate acts against one person, or two legal theories. Under O.C.G.A. § 16-5-21 a person commits aggravated assault by assaulting another with intent to murder, to rape, or to rob; with a deadly weapon or an object likely to or actually resulting in serious bodily injury; with an object likely to or actually resulting in strangulation; or by discharging a firearm from within a motor vehicle toward a person or persons without legal justification. The record compiled for this page does not say which of those either count alleges.

What does the firearm charge mean?
The charge WRDW lists as possession of a firearm or knife during commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies corresponds to O.C.G.A. § 16-11-106, which covers having a firearm, or a knife with a blade of three inches or more, on or within arm's reach during the commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies, including crimes against a person. It is a separate offense from the underlying felony. A first conviction carries five years, to run consecutively to any other sentence. Nothing cited here says which weapon is alleged.

Is this connected to any other McDuffie County case?
Nothing in the record compiled for this page connects this arrest to any other incident, and this page draws no connection to any other matter in McDuffie County or anywhere else. Two things happening in the same county on the same day are two things happening in the same county on the same day. Treating that as a link would be inventing a fact, and this page does not do it.

What does “according to jail records” mean?
It means the newsroom is relying on a jail booking record rather than on a statement from the sheriff's office or a court filing. A booking record shows who is in custody and what charges were entered at intake. It is not an indictment, it is not a prosecutor's charging decision, and the charges it lists can change before a case ever reaches a courtroom. It is a reliable record of custody and a weak record of what a case will become.

How does a case like this reach a grand jury in Georgia?
An arrest starts it, not a grand jury. In the ordinary course, a person arrested on a warrant is presented before a committing judicial officer, a district attorney reviews the file and decides what to charge, and a grand jury then decides whether to return an indictment. A grand jury applies a probable-cause standard, hears only the state's presentation, and sits in secret. Under O.C.G.A. § 17-7-50, a person arrested and refused bail is entitled to have the charge heard by a grand jury within 90 days of confinement, and if that does not happen the statute provides that the accused is entitled to have bail set on application to the court. No indictment appears in anything cited on this page.

Can someone charged with murder get bond in Georgia?
Only from a superior court judge. O.C.G.A. § 17-6-1 provides that a list of serious offenses is bailable only before a judge of the superior court, and murder is on that list. A magistrate cannot release a person charged with murder in Georgia. Nothing in the record compiled for this page says whether bond has been sought, set or denied in this matter.

How many sources are behind this page?
One newsroom and no government release. Everything about this arrest comes from a single WRDW story credited to Staff, published August 12, 2026 at 6:11 p.m. EDT. WRDW is an Augusta television station owned by Gray Media and shares the byline with WAGT; Gray Media is counted once. No sheriff's office statement, no court filing and no second newsroom stands behind anything here.

How do I get the arrest record or the incident report?
Jail booking information is held by the McDuffie County Sheriff's Office, which runs the jail. An incident report from the underlying investigation is a separate record held by the investigating agency. Both are requested under the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. § 50-18-70 and the sections that follow it. Under O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71 an agency must respond within a reasonable amount of time not to exceed three business days, and where responsive records exist but are not available in that window the agency provides a description of such records and a timeline for their delivery. Copying is capped at ten cents per page for letter or legal size documents. Expect redaction or denial while a prosecution is pending. Court filings are held by the clerk of superior court, not by an investigating agency.

Will this page be updated as more is learned?
No. This page is a record of what one newsroom established as of the timestamp on it, and nothing revisits it. WRDW's own story says the station is working to learn more; that is the station's statement about its work, not a commitment by this page.