Former Georgia man receives life sentence for Missouri attack

<p>A former Georgia man who was acquitted in the death of a Duluth woman has been sentneced to life in prison for a violent attack on a Missouri woman, court officials said.</p><p>Dale Wayne McKenzie, 45, was sentenced on Friday. The sentence allows the possibility of parole. He also received a 30-year consecutive term for first-degree burglary and a year in prison for third-degree assault, said Paul Fox, St. Louis County Judicial Circuit director.</p><p>In July, a St. Louis County jury found McKenzie guilty of first-degree burglary, first-degree assault and third-degree assault for the attack of a 28-year-old woman in her home in May 2005.</p><p>Authorities had arrested the Valley Park, Mo., man of breaking into a home in St. Louis County and attacking Carmen Dashiell, according to an indictment. Dashiell was the girlfriend of McKenzie's son, Jeremy Hendrickson.</p><p>McKenzie choked Dashiell "until she began to pass out" and then turned her over and lifted her robe, exposing her nude body, according to an incident report filed by St. Louis County Police Department Patrolman Joseph Craig.</p><p>A neighbor who heard the woman's screams for help, entered the home and fought McKenzie until police arrived, Craig said in the indictment. McKenzie also bit the neighbor on his arms and chest during the struggle, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Teresa Bomkamp wrote in the indictment.</p><p>Prosecutors claimed McKenzie could have killed Dashiell if not for her neighbor's intervention.</p><p>McKenzie, who was born in St. Louis, moved to Valley Park, Mo., after being found innocent in 2002 in Georgia in connection with the November 1999 death of Melissa Colleen Shreve, 30, of Duluth, Ga.</p><p>Shreve, who was stabbed to death, disappeared Nov. 13, 1999. Goose hunters found her body floating in eight feet of water at Nix Bridge Park in Dawson County nearly two weeks later.</p><p>The former senior engineer at Nortel Networks in Atlanta is listed as an absconding sex offender in Georgia after being found guilty of sodomy in Cherokee County in 1998. McKenzie also pleaded guilty to sexual battery in California 12 years ago, according to an indictment in St. Louis County Circuit Court.</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x1cdd930)</p>

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