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Jeff Beene, the 58-year-old owner of Plastic Industries in Athens, Tennessee, was shot inside his plant minutes after calling 911 just before midnight on Jan. 29, 2009, and died two days later at a hospital in Chattanooga.

Beene told a dispatcher he had a burglar at gunpoint inside the plant. The recorded call lasted about 38 seconds before it cut off. Four minutes later, officers arrived and found Beene shot inside the building.

Beene had run the injection-molding company for decades and had been sleeping at the plant to catch burglars who had targeted it repeatedly. Authorities said he held a man at gunpoint under similar circumstances in December 2008.

Investigators later determined Beene did not realize a second man, Jeffery Coleman, was hiding inside the building when he confronted the intruder. McMinn County District Attorney General Steve Bebb said Beene was likely grabbed from behind and shot by Daniel Lankey, a former Plastic Industries employee who had escaped from the Meigs County Jail about six weeks earlier while awaiting trial on a rape charge.

Authorities said Lankey and Coleman were found hiding in the woods behind a clothing store across the street from the plant. Lankey was arrested Feb. 9, 2009, after a traffic stop in Riceville. McMinn County Sheriff Steve Frisbee said a pistol recovered from him matched the gun used to kill Beene. Lankey confessed, and Coleman, taken into custody days later on an unrelated warrant, admitted to being his accomplice, the sheriff's office said. A grand jury indicted both men on felony murder charges, with bond set at $1 million each.

More than a year later, as Lankey's trial got underway in McMinn County, prosecutors offered him a plea deal. On Feb. 10, 2010, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, avoiding the life sentence he faced if convicted of first-degree murder, Bebb said. Bebb said he consulted Beene's sons, Jeffrey and Jones, before extending the offer, calling their father's death a painful loss for the family and the community. Tennessee Department of Correction records show Lankey remains incarcerated, with a sentence that runs until 2046. Bebb said at the time that the murder charge against Coleman was expected to be reduced to burglary, with prosecutors seeking a six-year sentence for his role in the break-in.