A Georgia man was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and killing his sister’s boyfriend after a dispute over a Hot Pocket snack, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said that the now convicted killer, Nathaniel Mathis, had asked his sister’s boyfriend, Rodney Benton, to buy some pepperoni Hot Pockets when they went to the store. But the pair came back on that June day in 2016 without the snacks telling Mathis that they were not in stock. In addition, the two ended up leaving all the groceries back at the store because Mathis’s EBT card had no money in its account so they couldn’t pay for the items, Fox 8 reported.
The three began arguing about the incident over the phone, and when they returned home the argument quickly turned violent, police said.
“The defendant was home and still upset when he approached the SUV,” the Fulton County District Attorney’s office said.
During his trial, prosecutors said that Mathis approached the two as they got out of the SUV, said, “you know what’s going on,” then pulled a gun and shot Benton eight times killing him.
Prosecutors also presented a neighbor who witnessed the incident and was able to testify that Mathis was the shooter.
Police soon arrived on June 11, 2016, at first thinking Mathis was barricaded in his home, but Mathis had fled the scene. Not long after he met a woman in a local park and asked her to tell his sister, “I just snapped. I love her and didn’t mean for it to happen this way.”
Police later discovered Mathis still armed with the murder weapon in a park and threatening to kill himself. After a standoff of several hours, police shot Mathis with a non-lethal beanbag gun and took him into custody without further incident.
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