Inset: Kavonn Ingram (Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office). Background: The location where Alexander Stengel’s body was found (WITI).
A Wisconsin man will spend decades in prison for shooting and killing his Pizza Hut manager, whose body was found stuffed in a bag behind the restaurant.
Kavonn Ingram was sentenced on Friday to 45 years for the killing of 55-year-old Alexander Stengel. Ingram pleaded guilty in August to first-degree reckless homicide.
Before being sentenced, Ingram took claimed responsibility for his actions after the killing but said he was attacked first, and it was self-defense, local CBS affiliate WDJT reported.
“I take responsibility for my wrong actions taken after the altercation at Pizza Hut,” he said. “However, the events leading up to the altercation, as well as the physical fight, caused me to act in survival mode.”
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Michelle Havas didn’t buy it.
“Frankly, I don’t believe you,” Havas said, the outlet reported. “I don’t believe for one second that this was anything but a cold-blooded execution of someone who worked for 33 years for crappy wages at a Pizza Hut, because it’s what he could do.”
The series of events leading up to the murder began on Feb. 3, after Stengel showed his colleagues, including Ingram, a large roll of cash — part of a $7,000 inheritance, Law&Crime reported then.
Two days later, Ingram shot Stengel in the head in the kitchen of the Pizza Hut North Chicago Avenue in Milwaukee, then put the body in two garbage bags, carted the remains out back and dumped his body in a dumpster.
He tried to mop up the murder scene and used Stengel’s phone to text Stengel’s regional manager that he was not feeling well and was leaving work early, and clocked Stengel out of work. Ingram then took a bus home.
The murder was discovered two days later when a trash truck driver called the police, reporting a garbage can that looked like it had a body in it.
Police found the body wrapped in a plastic bag.
“Officer Hesse could see shoes attached to feet and legs sticking out of the can and underneath the plastic bag,” court documents said.
There was a pool of blood below it. A trail of dried blood led from the body to the back door of the restaurant.
In the restaurant, officers found a “portion of the tiled kitchen floor” “uncharacteristically clean.”
In the closet, officers found what appeared to be “coagulated blood/flesh on the bottom of the slop sink,” a bloody mop and an apparent blood smear on the closet light switch.
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