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NEW ORLEANS — A New Orleans man was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison for beating a federal drug agent to death in a robbery.
Ameal Parker, 47, pleaded guilty in July to second-degree murder in the death of Thomas J. Byrne, a 16-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Parker was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt under the terms of a plea agreement.
Byrne, 40, was a Houston-based agent who was visiting New Orleans for a Justice Department conference on organized crime in August 2008 when he was robbed and beaten several blocks from the French Quarter. He died at a New Orleans hospital two days after the attack, just before Hurricane Gustav made landfall about 90 miles southwest of the city on Sept. 1, 2008.
On the night of Aug. 27, Byrne and other federal agents had dinner and drinks in the French Quarter and had left a bar shortly before Parker assaulted Byrne and stole his wallet, prosecutors said.
Surveillance cameras showed Parker following Byrne, but the attack wasn’t captured on tape. Minutes later, Parker was caught on tape trying to use Byrne’s credit card to withdraw money from an ATM.
Parker, also known as Ameal Varnado, was arrested less than a day after the attack. A second person was arrested on charges stemming from the alleged theft of Byrne’s credit card, but Parker was the only suspect charged in Byrne’s death.
Byrne is survived by a wife and four children. He joined the DEA in 1992 as an intelligence research specialist based in Washington and worked at field offices in Miami and the Bahamas before he arrived in Houston, where he was a supervisory agent.
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