Victims ask parole board to do what Athens DA's office did not - keep sexual predator behind bars for life

The DA’s office in Athens knew for years Pendergraph was a predator. 

In 2014, he faced 21 felony charges for invasion of privacy. 11Alive spoke with one of Pendergraph’s first victims. She asked us to conceal her identity and refer to her only as Samantha.

Samantha said the two met in high school and continued dating at the start of her freshman year of college. She said Pendergraph often asked her to send him pictures of her naked body.

“He continuously asked and I continuously told him no, that I was not comfortable with that. I did not want to share that," she said. "I did not want the possibility of someone else seeing those images in any way, whether it was on his phone, on a computer screen, accidentally or whatever. But eventually I gave in and I sent a few images.”

About five years later, long after they had parted ways, Samantha would learn Pendergraph posted her photos online.

“He was including my full name. He was including details about where I was in school, where he thought I lived,” Samantha said. 

Samantha eventually found three other women who are victims of the same violation of privacy. When the websites wouldn’t remove their images and information, they went to police.

“You feel a lot of judgment from people in law enforcement who don't really understand the ins and outs of the harassment that comes from this,” Samantha recalled.

Perhaps it was that lack of understanding that led prosecutors to offer a plea reducing Pendergraph’s 21 felony charges to two misdemeanors for reckless conduct. His punishment was 18 months probation.

“It was infuriating,” Samantha said. “Because we knew that it wasn't over that he was not going to leave us alone. And, of course, he didn't.”

As soon as his probation was up, Samantha said Pendergraph used various fake social media profiles to reconnect and he quickly found new victims.

'They discovered a horrific monster'

It was one of those victims, Katelyn Brooks, who led police back to Pendergraph. 

Brooks met Pendergraph when she rented a room to him in the house where she was staying. 

“He had started to be really creepy and weird things were going on in her bathroom,” Brooks' sister Emily said. 

The family later learned Pendergraph placed a hidden camera in her bathroom; it was disguised as a wall plug with a USB charging adapter. He used the camera to record images of her naked and posted the content on porn sites and chat rooms.

In some cases, police discovered he also posted a picture of her driver’s license and credit card.

Police reports reveal Pendergraph liked to add messages to the posts -- most too offensive to repeat. But one revealed his intent. “I want to truly rob her of her private life in a full and cruel degrading way," he wrote.

“Because she came forward, they discovered a horrific monster,” Emily said.

The investigation into Brooks case led police to his room inside his parent’s home in Lagrange. There they found several more cameras hidden in a key fob and smoke alarm. They also seized several electronic devices which provided a trail of victims.

The police investigation detailing the dozens of accounts created and used by Pendergraph is more than 100 pages long.  

Hidden cameras were placed in bathrooms at a Starbucks, a church in Lagrange and at Creswell Hall dorm at UGA. Pendergraph targeted men, women, and even children.

11Alive obtained a document police said they found during their investigation that offers a tutorial on how to groom children. One chapter discussed how to “take and keep a little girl for sex.”

“He was creating images of children in addition to possessing images of children,” Troup County District Attorney Herbert Cranford said. 

Local police, the GBI, Homeland Security, and even officers in Russia worked together to track and shut down accounts with names like 'Atlanta Slut' and 'Wife is my Slave.'

Investigators found examples of photos taken off social media and placed on the naked bodies of other women along with their real names and identifying information.

They also found images of sexual encounters that did not appear consensual.

“Did you ever allow him to record videos of you guys having sex?” Srgt. Scott Prah asked one of the victims on the phone. Srgt. Prah with the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, was the lead investigator on the case.

“Never, never consented to anything like that,” the woman responded.

After interviewing the women involved, police ruled one woman had been drugged and sodomized. Another woman, police believe, was raped.

According to police reports, Pendergraph wasn’t just looking for sexually explicit content, he wanted control. In one online post he wrote, “Her body isn’t hers anymore, it’s yours… forever.”

Forever is how long the DA in Troup County wanted Pendergraph to stay behind bars.

“I do not believe he is redeemable,” Cranford said. “I don’t say that often, but there are people we prosecute that I believe that about and he’s one of them.”

Cranford points to a 16-minute phone call Pendergraph made from jail to his ex-girlfriend. She just learned from police he secretly sexually assaulted her, recorded it and posted it online. 

"Your calls are giving me a panic attack. Do not call me again," the woman is heard saying to Pendergraph on the phone.

"I'm calling you because I love you, and I feel like I'm," Pendergraph responds.

"You are a liar. Everything you say is a lie," his ex-girlfriend replies.

"With God as my witness, I have not done that to you. Are you there?" Pendergraph said. 

'It would have shown the jury just how callous of a liar he was.'

Cranford said that call ‘would’ have been a key piece of evidence had the case gone to trial.

“When he out and out denied it, we had the direct evidence that he was lying about it," Cranford said. "It would have shown the jury just how callous of a liar he was.”

In Troup County, the prosecutor on the case, David McLaughlin poured over the evidence to build a case strong enough to convince Pendergraph to plead guilty to racketeering, invasion of privacy, sexual exploitation of children, criminal trespass, and possession of eavesdropping devices.

During the hearing, Pendergraph did address the court saying, “I allowed immaturity and overindulgence, coupled with the combined addictions to Adderall, alcohol, and pornography to take me to a dark and depraved world. But these things can only help to explain my actions. These are not justifications or excuses.”

You can read his full statement here.

The judge sentenced Pendergraph to 50 years behind bars, with 20 years probation. It's a hefty sentence, at least on paper. In reality, for those kinds of crimes under Georgia law, Pendergraph is eligible for parole after seven years of confinement.

It happened before. Cranford recalled the case of Peter Mallory.

“Prolific collector of child pornography,” Cranford said. “The judge gave him a 1,000 year sentence to make a point I think.”

The parole board released Mallory after serving just seven years and five months of his sentence.

Cranford said the only way to guarantee a longer prison sentence is a guilty plea or conviction to one of the state’s enhanced sentencing crimes. In Pendergraph's case, this would be aggravated rape and aggravated sodomy.

“They come with a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison without the possibility of parole,” Cranford said. 

Cranford couldn’t prosecute those charges because the alleged crimes happened in Athens-Clarke County. It's up to the District Attorney there to move forward with those charges.

According to emails, the Athens DA’s office agreed Pendergraph should face life in prison. But, when he refused a plea deal with those charges, the prosecutor decided to dismiss them rather than go to trial. 

The DA’s office instead allowed him to plea to three counts of invasion of privacy.

They sentenced Pendergraph to 10 years in prison, but the deal allows him to serve those years at the same time as his sentence in Troup, effectively adding no new consequence for his actions.

“I can’t imagine a detective seeing these terrible things that this person has done day after day, and then to see it all disappear,” said Samantha, who now works as an attorney in Georgia. “I can't imagine that that detective would feel motivated on the next case to put in the time and effort.”

Indeed, the lead detective stated his "disgust" in an email to the DA shortly after the decision was made public. 

In the letter he wrote, "there are many sad things to come from this case but one of the most disheartening is that your office did not even try."

In a memo sent by Athen-Clarke County District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez shortly after taking office, she tells prosecutors to "consider the impact of mandatory minimum sentencing and require supervisor approval prior to pursuing charges that carry mandatory minimum sentences."

It's unclear if that policy had any impact on the office's decision to change course. 11Alive reached out Gerald Henderson, the prosecutor behind the decision. He declined to comment. But we spoke with DA Gonzalez who defended the deal.

“Police officers spent hundreds of hours researching this case just to get a sentence that is being served at the same time as somebody else’s case. Why do anything at all?” 11Alive investigator Rebecca Lindstrom asked Gonzalez.

“Because we have victims and we wanted to get justice for those victims,” Gonzalez replied. “They did not want to go forward with the trial. They did not want to testify. They wanted a resolution to this trial.”

In a letter from the victims to the parole board, they wrote the DA's office said Pendergraph was pleading guilty to sodomy and it would add to his time behind bars. In that letter, a victim wrote, “I feel very lied to and betrayed by the Athens DA.”

A second victim associated with the charges declined to comment for this story.

And Katelyn Brooks, whose charges were also dismissed in Athens-Clarke County, could not share her side of the story. The DA’s office told the judge it wanted to drop her charges because Brooks had “left the state.” 

Brooks died by suicide a day after Pendergraph was sentenced. 

“I’m so angry. Hurt so bad,” Katelyn’s father Mark said, barely able to speak.

Brooks’ family said they blame Pendergraph for Katelyn’s death.

“I whole heartedly believe Katelyn would still be here, from the bottom of my heart would still be here, had he not come into her life and destroyed it,” Emily said.

After the pornographic posts were discovered, Katelyn's family said she couldn’t stay focused at work. She dropped out of law school. She moved back home. Even with all those changes, she could never restore her sense of safety.

“I remember in the middle of the night she woke me up, ‘Dad I think somebody’s in the attic with cameras.’ I had to remove the vent like that and shined my flashlight up there to show her there’s no way, that’s just a floppy little tube,” her father recalled.

The risk of his release

Victims see Pendergraph's plea deal in Clarke-County as just one example of what can happen when a district attorney with no criminal law experience leads an office in turmoil.

The same year Pendergraph took his plea, about a third of the cases on the court docket were thrown out. Twenty two percent of the felony charges that remained were also dismissed or reduced to a misdemeanor as part of a plea.

Of the 18 trials in Athens-Clarke County in 2022, the office lost 14. Charges like murder, aggravated assault, and child molestation -- all dismissed.  

“When something happens that’s a mistake or shouldn’t have happened, we do very well at regrouping again and saying okay this is what happened, debriefing it,” Gonzalez said defending her office's work.

Only one of the prosecutors working in Gonzalez's office in 2022 remains in her office today. Court records consistently record cases delayed or even dismissed because the DA is “severely understaffed” and “not prepared.”

It’s why Pendergraph’s victims are now appealing to the parole board to consider the charges dropped and the risk of his release.

Samantha said it’s hard for people to understand the impact this has had on victims’ lives.

“An extreme sense of shame," she said. "It also led me to become a very anxious person who question my own judgment. So, I spent many years in therapy really trying to trust myself, Trust my own judgment about other people."

The victim impact statements are full of the same words: shame, anxiety, and depression. For Katelyn, the personal violation consumed her.

“We just saw her physically, emotionally, mentally deteriorate,” said Emily.

And Pendergraph’s victims believe that was always part of the plan. Part of his betrayal.

“He had the opportunity to change in 2016 when he was on probation. He didn't,” Samantha said. “I want you to know the name Avery Hogan Pendergraph. And, if you ever come across him on the street one day, I want you to run in the other direction.”