FORSYTH, Ga. – The Hall County Superior Court has ordered the execution of convicted murderer Scotty Garnell Morrow.

The court ordered the Georgia Department of Corrections to carry out the execution on a date between May 2 and May 9, 2019. GDOC Commissioner Timothy C. Ward has set the date for Thursday, May 2, at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson at 7 p.m.

Morrow was sentenced to death in 1999 for the Dec. 29, 1994, murders of Barbara Ann Young and her friend Tonya Woods. Young was once Morrow’s girlfriend, and Hall County prosecutors said he beat and sexually assaulted her in the weeks prior to the killings. 

Morrow reportedly drove to Young’s home following a phone conversation and entered without permission. Young was with two friends, Tonya Woods and LaToya Horne. Two of Young’s children, ages five-years-old and eight months, were also present. 

Woods told Morrow to leave during an argument and Morrow pulled a 9 mm pistol, shooting Woods in the abdomen and Horne in the arm.

Morrow chased Young down the hallway, caught her in the bedroom and beat her in the head and face before she was able to briefly escape back to the hallway, where he grabbed her hair and shot her in the head.

Her five-year-old boy witnessed the murder from a hiding place in another bedroom.

Morrow returned to the kitchen and shot Woods and Horne again. While Woods had been paralyzed by the shot to the abdomen, the medical examiner in the case theorized she was probably still conscious when the fatal shot was fired.

According to AJC, Georgia last carried out an execution on May 4, 2018. That execution, of Robert Earl Butts, was one of two carried out in Georgia last year.  Georgia juries are not imposing death sentences as much in recent years and it has now been more than five years since a murder defendant in Georgia received a death sentence.

If executed, Morrow will be the 50th inmate put to death by lethal injection.