Former Enterprise man sentenced to 6 years for assaulting wife

A former Enterprise man was sentenced to six years in prison for the assault of his wife that resulted in injuries an emergency room doctor called the worst he’d ever seen.
James W. Reynolds, 40, was sentenced to 72 months in state by Circuit Judge Jeff Kelley in Coffee County Circuit Court Monday morning.
Earlier last month, a six-man, six-woman jury took 30 minutes to find Reynolds guilty of the felony offense following a day-long trial in Enterprise.
“There is a fine line between physical harm and death,” Twelfth Judicial Circuit Assistant District Attorney Jeff Moore told the judge, asking him to sentence Reynolds to 10 years in prison.
“The emergency room doctor testified that it was the worst facial fracture he had ever seen.”
Reynold’s attorney, Rick Hollingsworth, told the court the assault was an isolated incident and that Reynolds did not have a history of violence. Hollingsworth said that although Reynolds was terminated from his employment after the jury’s verdict, he had been paying $1,400 child support. Hollingsworth asked the judge to consider a sentence involving probation so that Reyolds could obtain employment and continue to make those payments.
At the trial on Jan. 12, Assistant District Attorney Larry Jerrell and Hollingsworth both agreed that Reynolds hit his then-wife Lisa Kelley, 34, in the face following a verbal altercation on July 13, 2008. Both attorneys agreed that the injuries sustained by Kelley required extensive medical attention. The issue in dispute was whether the assault was intentional.
Kelley testified that she had entered the couple’s bedroom that evening and tried to shake her husband awake after he walked away from their argument. She believed he was having an affair and had confronted him about it, she said.
Kelley said Reynolds got up from the bed, grabbed her by the hair on the back of her head and punched her on the left side of her face until she passed out.
Two of Reynold’s three children testified and both said that on the evening of July 13, 2008, they saw their mother go into their parents’ bedroom and try to shake their father awake following a verbal altercation.
The 11-year-old said that she left the bedroom to seek help from the one other adult in the home after she saw her father get out of bed. She said she had tried to call 911 but that her father had emerged from the bedroom and grabbed the phone from her. The 10-year-old said that he saw his father grab his mother by the hair, “spin her around” and punch her.
Both children and Kelley said that the adult family friend who had been at the couple’s home all day told Reynolds that Kelley needed to go to the hospital.
“She’s not going to the hospital because I am not going to jail for this,” Kelley said Reynolds said.
When Reynolds began to argue with the family friend, Kelley took the opportunity to get herself and her children to a neighbor’s home, she said. It was there that Enterprise Police Officer Matthew Saxon and his partner first encountered Kelley, who told him that her husband had hit her.
After getting Kelley medical attention, Saxon interviewed Reynolds. “He did not deny hitting her,” Saxon said.
The emergency room doctor who treated Kelley upon her arrival by ambulance at Medical Center Enterprise testified that her injuries were “the worst I have sever seen” in 16 years practicing emergency medicine.
Kelley’s facial wounds “were conducive to multiple blows to the face,” Dr. Nicholas Manzuri Jr, said.
“She was hit many times.” Her nose was crushed and her eye socket was fractured, he said.
“That damage could not have been inflicted by a single blow.”
Kelley said she has had corrective surgery to implant titanium plates in the left side of her face and that she still suffers from migraine headaches on the left side of her head.