A prisoner at the Augusta State Medical Prison has been charged with strangling a cellmate to death, authorities said.
Johnathan Randy Fesperman, 26, has been charged with murder in the death of 61-year-old Amos Huff. He was booked Tuesday at the Richmond County Detention Center since the murder happened on the Richmond County side of the prison, which is located in Grovetown on the border with Columbia County.
Fesperman is accused of strangling Huff with a sheet-like material of fiber or string and his hands just after dinnertime last Thursday (March 30). Inmates near the cell heard the commotion, but Fesperman soon confessed to prison guards that he had just killed Huff, authorities said.
Not much is known about Huff since his information has already been removed from the prison website. His body was being returned Wednesday after an autopsy, and Thomas L. King Funeral Home is in charge.
Fesperman is serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery and other related crimes. At the time of his arrest as a teenager in 2019, he was already a convicted felon for earlier robberies, gun charges and car break-ins in South Carolina. He was charged in 2016 as a teenager in Richmond County with theft ad gun charges.
Fesperman was also convicted of robbing a Marathon convenience store at gunpoint in McDuffie County, along with another suspect.
Augusta State Medical Prison has witnessed numerous murders in recent years. According to prisonlegalnews.org, DOC prisons have a murder rate four times that of the entire Atlanta metropolitan area. In fact, 57 DOC prisoners were victims of homicide in 2020 and 2021, a nearly 300% increase over 2018 and 2019. The murders usually involved stabbings, but they also included garroting, asphyxia due to manual strangulation, blunt force head trauma and even smoke inhalation.
