Springfield man gets five years in Waverly equipment theft case
A five-year prison term ended a Waverly theft case that had lingered for about 18 months after equipment vanished from T and T Construction on Elm Street.
T and T Construction got its answer on April 29, when a Morgan County judge sentenced 42-year-old David Bennett of Springfield to five years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for a theft that had lingered over Waverly since October 2024.
The case involved equipment taken from T and T Construction at a site on Elm Street in Waverly, a loss that left the local business waiting through months of court delays before the sentence finally closed the loop. Bennett had failed to appear in court until earlier this year, stretching out a case that began with a job-site theft and ended with a prison term.
Bennett’s sentence carries added weight because it will run at the same time as a similar sentence in Tazewell County. That means the Morgan County punishment is not a separate block of prison time added on top of his other case, but part of the same overall stretch in state custody. For county residents following the case, that detail makes the outcome look less like an isolated theft case and more like one chapter in a wider run of legal trouble.
The Morgan County case was handled in the 7th Circuit of the Illinois court system, with the county courthouse located at 300 W. State Street in Jacksonville. Tazewell County falls in the 10th Circuit, with its courthouse at 342 Court Street in Pekin. Those separate court settings help explain why Bennett’s cases could move on parallel tracks while still ending in concurrent sentences.
For Waverly, the sentence brings a clear finish to a theft that started as an equipment loss at a small-town construction site and became a longer legal fight than many locals likely expected. The theft happened more than a year and a half before the sentence, giving the case a sense of unfinished business that now has a firm ending.
Morgan County court records are maintained by the circuit clerks, and the Bennett case now joins the county’s steady stream of felony sentencing orders. In this instance, though, the outcome is simple: a Springfield defendant, a Waverly business victim, and five years in state prison to mark the end of a case that had stayed open too long.
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