Accused shooter of teen reported rock throwers, once spoke of ‘bad blacks’

Postings around Elisabeth Cannon’s house warn folks to stay away.

“Private property, no trespassing,” reads a sign on a tree in her front yard.

“Keep out,” bold orange letters declare on another sign on the locked chain-link fence at 4030 Bloomfield Drive.

“No solicitation” is penned on the screen door.

Burglar bars are on the windows, but Cannon was not going to be a prisoner in her own house.

That’s what the former nurse told The Telegraph in 2013 for the “Macon in the Mirror” project with the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University.

She shared concerns about the safety of her neighborhood off Rocky Creek Road.

“Everybody tells me I shouldn’t come out of the house,” said Cannon, referring to herself as an “unbreakable Christian.”

“If anybody shoots or kills me, I’ll be in a better place. ... I may have bars on my house, but I’m not gonna live behind bars.”

Cannon was in jail Tuesday, being held in lieu of $12,400 bond. She was locked up just before midnight Monday, hours after allegedly shooting 15-year-old Vernon Marcus Jr., who was walking past her house just before 8 p.m., investigators said.

Hours before, Cannon called Bibb County sheriff’s deputies because “kids were throwing rocks at her home,” said Sgt. Linda Howard, a public information officer for the sheriff’s office.

Cannon was charged with two counts of aggravated assault.

Deputies said Marcus was with some friends when they heard several shots. Then they noticed he had been shot in the head.

Marcus fell on the sidewalk, about 30 feet from Cannon’s circular driveway.

He was rushed to the Medical Center, Navicent Health, in critical condition.

In speaking to The Telegraph four years ago, Cannon, a former nurse who is white, was asked what frustrates her about Macon and what concerns she has about her neighborhood.

“I have some really good black neighbors,” Cannon said.

Marcus, who is black, is believed to live nearby, said a young woman who lives a couple doors down and heard several gunshots Monday night.

In her 2013 interview with The Telegraph, Cannon went on to say: “But the good blacks won’t get onto the bad blacks. You try not to profile, but at the same time 99.9 percent of the crime is gonna be, most often, a black male. ... The good blacks are too busy. They walk by your house, they won’t give it a second look. ... You can tell if they’re just out walking for exercise or going to the store or whether they’re up to something.”

At a first-appearance hearing in Bibb Magistrate Court on Tuesday afternoon, testimony emerged that Cannon had admitted to a sheriff’s deputy at the scene that she had fired several shots.

“Just to scare the gentlemens that was walking near her property, and she didn’t mean to hit one of them,” Bibb sheriff’s Sgt. Pamela Williams said at the hearing.

Williams said Cannon had called authorities earlier in the day Monday to report “three black males (who) had been throwing rocks at her house three days prior to this incident. ... Miss Cannon had basically said that if they come back in her yard or in her area, she was gonna shoot them. And less than three to four hours later, we get a call (about a shooting).”

It wasn’t clear whether the people Cannon had accused of throwing rocks were the people she is said to have opened fire on.

Williams added that someone who was walking with Marcus, the gunshot victim, told investigators “they had walked to the store and was walking back to their house. And just as they passed Miss Cannon’s house they heard several shots coming from the area. He looked back and saw that his friend had been hit.”

Williams said the person with Marcus told investigators that Cannon had in the past “been harassing them, claiming that they’ve been breaking into her house. ... He also said that she’s used several racial slurs towards them.”

Cannon lives a short walk from a convenience store at the corner of Rocky Creek Road. In her 2013 interview with The Telegraph, she said she had lived in Macon since she was 4. She said her grandmother was of Native American descent, a Cherokee.

Cannon said she “despised” the way the city sometimes allowed convenience stores to open in residential areas.

“They’ll let a Magic Market plop itself right in the middle,” she said.

Cannon mentioned that she had back problems and couldn’t work.

“Now I just enjoy family and friends and church, and getting out and walking,” she said.

Just down the street toward Rocky Creek Road and the convenience store, Eric Thomas Jones runs the 1st Choice Detail Shop & Auto Sales. He often notices the foot traffic to the store.

He, too, posted “no trespassing” signs and fenced his property after cars were stolen, broken into and vandalized at his shop.

“We have to work together as a community to try to deter stuff,” Jones, who is black, said. “There’s a few of them they’ll try to provoke you.”

Jones, who has been in business there about a dozen years, has met Cannon and understands she doesn’t want people trespassing through her property.

“Young people are in their own world, and they can make you mad quickly,” Jones said.

He tries to keep up with the parents of young people so that he can contact them if he has a problem with teens being disrespectful.

“You have to restrain yourself from responding to them because it’s easy for one thing to lead to another, and there’s consequences,” he said.

Jones applauded the Bloomfield community’s march to put down the guns Saturday after the recent shooting of pizza delivery driver Brooklyn Rouse on Vivian Drive.

“We’ve got to stay on it. We can’t get slack ‘cause, you know, trouble’s coming every day, too often, too soon,” Jones said. “It takes a whole community to make everything better for the people that live in it — especially the old people who work real hard. They have a right to enjoy their house and sit on their porch.”

This story was originally published January 17, 2017 at 12:08 PM with the headline "Accused shooter of teen reported rock throwers, once spoke of ‘bad blacks’."