Left: Mamadi Tambajang (Sandy Springs Police Department). Right: Amber Kelly (JP Holley Funeral Home).
A Georgia man will spend the rest of his days behind bars for beating and stomping his girlfriend to death and waiting more than a day to alert authorities about what happened.
Mamadi Tambajang was convicted of murder in the death of 31-year-old Amber Kelly at their apartment in Sandy Springs. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 50 years, cops said.
Tambajang walked into the Sandy Springs Police Department on May 15, 2024, and said he wanted to turn himself in for harming his girlfriend. He asked that they conduct a welfare check on her at their apartment because he didn”t know if she was dead or alive. They found her beaten to death.
“The crime scene was horrific,” Asia Baysah, Fulton County deputy district attorney, told local ABC affiliate WSB. “He knew she wasn’t OK. She had over 25 different blunt force traumas to her body.”
Prosecutors told WSB that Tambajang had two other domestic violence cases for assaulting Kelly at the time of the murder. She called police about a year before her killing.
“He’s a violent person, and he threatened to murder me twice this week,” she told dispatchers in a call obtained by WSB.
Family told the outlet that it repeatedly advised Kelly to leave Tambajang, but she believed he could be a good man. The abuse continued and eventually led to her death.
Prosecutors said that Tambajang claimed he simply “snapped.”
“He said that he was provoked to inflict those injuries upon Amber,” Fulton County Assistant District Attorney Jazmin Dilligard said in an interview with WSB.
Cops believe the suspect murdered Kelly a day or two before he turned himself in. After he killed her, he reportedly drove to his mother’s house in South Carolina before he drove to Sandy Springs police and expressed concern about Kelly’s well-being.
“It was fake. If he was truly concerned about her, he would have called 911,” said Dilligard. “He did everything but seek medical treatment.”
Kelly’s mother Sharon Henderson recalled when cops knocked on her door to alert her of her daughter’s death.
“I felt like my heart stopped beating the moment I found out that my baby was no longer here with us,” she told WSB.
