A Lafayette man, Josh Dotts, 23, was sentenced Monday in Davidson County Criminal Court to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to facilitation of second-degree murder in connection with the drowning death of a homeless woman in Nashville.

Dotts had maintained that he did not push Tara Cole, 32, into the Cumberland River on the night of August 11, 2006. The Lafayette man has been in the Metro Nashville jail for more than a year, and will have to serve only a few months more in prison before becoming eligible for parole, according to his lawyer, Jack Lowery of Lebanon.

A second man, Timothy Webber, 22, Lebanon, will have to serve his entire 17 year prison sentence, after entering a guilty plea to second-degree murder before Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Randall Wyatt.

The two men were arrested by Metro Police on August 24, 2006, after witnesses identified the men on downtown surveillance camera tapes. They had also been charged with aggravated assault in connection an alleged attack on a homeless man which occurred earlier on the same night a sleeping Tara Cole died after being pushed into the Cumberland River.

Since Cole's death last year, a documentary film “An Angle Unaware: The Tara Cole Story” was released this month. The homeless and mentally ill woman's death brought wide-spread attention to persons in her plight in Nashville.

Police said Dotts and Webber were drunk, and had dared one another to push Tara Cole into the river, after earlier assaulting several other homeless people in Nashville on lower Broadway near Riverfront Park.

Dotts had been arrested here by Lafayette Police just eighteen hours after the Nashville attacks, and charged with DUI. Webber was a passenger in Dott's vehicle at the time.

The men were later identified and arrested in connection with Tara Cole's death, after a two-week investigation by Metro Nashville Police.