O’Neal sentenced to life
He gets life without parole for his brutal attack in an Everett Springs home invasion.
Bearing the scar from where a butcher knife was drawn across her throat by the hand of Teddy Eugene O’Neal, Angie Dunagan squared up to the lectern and recalled the harrowing home invasion of June 9, 2017.
“I began to pour blood all down my shirt,” a white tank top, she said during O’Neal’s plea hearing Thursday afternoon in Floyd County Superior Court. “I live with this memory of what happened to me every day.”
“I wish I could change things for you,” Judge Jack Niedrach said, following Dunagan’s address. “But I can’t.”
Moments later, Niedrach sentenced O’Neal, 37, to life without parole after he pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree home invasion, aggravated assault, theft by taking and aggravated battery, three counts.
“Obviously this is the type of crime nightmares are made of,” said Assistant District Attorney Emily Johnson.
According to information presented in court:
O’Neal had been at a drug house on Lovers Lane Road in the Pocket area the day before the incident, getting high on methamphetamine into the early morning hours of June 9 — about a month after his release from prison. After being kicked out of the home and blacking out, he woke up outside. He walked down Everett Springs Road, eventually making it to Dunagan’s home, where he saw two cars inside the garage.
Dunagan had just gotten out of the shower when O’Neal, a stranger, knocked on the door, concealing a T-ball bat which he took from a car at the drug house. The door was opened and O’Neal told Dunagan his car had run out of the gas up the road. But he then pushed his way inside and the struggle ensued.
O’Neal beat Dunagan down with the bat and ripped the phone cord from the wall. The 5-foot 64-year-old woman, weighing 100 pounds, was dragged down the hall, and he beat her “under pictures of her grandchildren.”
“I saw blood fly all over the walls,” Dunagan said.
She was brought into the bedroom, and with two hands he choked her while she was on the bed. “Do you know God,” Dunagan said to O’Neal, creating a pause in his attack, allowing her to run from the bedroom and through the house as he chased her down. While entering the kitchen, O’Neal grabbed a knife from the butcher block and swung it at her, slitting her throat, cutting her head and slicing her ear in half.
And he continued to beat her. But Dunagan was still alive, as she lay across the floor by the back door.
O’Neal took the keys to her 2007 GMC Yukon and left the home. Dunagan managed to get outside and get a signal in the remote area of the county, using a cellphone to call her husband and daughter.
In the bodycam footage from a responding officer, Dunagan was surrounded by family at the back of the home. A towel was draped over her head and shoulders and her breath quivered as she talked with police. She was later taken by helicopter from Redmond Regional Medical Center to Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga.
Floyd County police arrested O’Neal at the Family Dollar in Lindale that afternoon, finding him passed out in the vehicle, apparently oblivious to what just happened.
District Attorney Leigh Patterson said Dunagan’s efforts in fighting off O’Neal were courageous and she displayed “tremendous bravery” in speaking in court, with her assailant right there again.
O’Neal apologized to Dunagan and her family, adding that “it makes me sick to my stomach when I read that discovery pack.
“I want any type of help I can get,” he said.