‘He lived that fast life,’ mother says of man fatally shot outside Macon lounge

Her son was dead and Lisa Brewster was distraught, beside herself trying to make sense of it.

She had been asleep in the early hours of Saturday morning when her only boy, Darian, was shot in the chest at close range while sitting in his car outside a downtown Macon nightclub.

The killing happened about 4 a.m. near the Dream Bar & Lounge on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The club sits less than a block from Oglethorpe Street, maybe a minute’s drive from the county jail and perhaps twice that far from the nearest emergency room. That is where police said Darian Vashawn Brewster, 34, drove himself after the shooting — to the Medical Center, Navicent Health. He died minutes later.

There had been an argument of some kind — “a verbal altercation,” was all investigators would say — between him and another man at the club. The other man apparently walked up to Darian’s car and shot him. Bibb County sheriff’s deputies were still looking for the shooter Saturday afternoon.

Barely four hours after the gunfire, Lisa Brewster, 50, was at her house off North Atwood Drive on Macon’s west side. She was sobbing — shaken — in that woozy limbo between hearing about the loss of a loved one and still not believing it.

She had just come from the hospital.

“I had to go and view my child’s body,” she told a reporter in her living room, where a television infomercial droned and a goldfish tank burbled. “They shot my child.”

Her daughter, Shantisha Williams, 22, sat on a sofa across the room.

“He had one of them fast kind of lives,” Williams said of her brother. “But he wasn’t no bad person.”

Darian was known as “D-Roc.” He’d gone to Southwest High School.

Over the years, he had been in trouble. He was charged with DUI, eluding police and aggravated assault on a peace officer.

He went to prison in 2012 on cocaine charges. He got out two summers ago.

His mother couldn’t recall any jobs he’d had, just that he sold drugs — marijuana “and powder,” she said.

He had six or seven children. His mother wasn’t sure.

“He was always there for his kids,” his sister said. “They loved him to death.”

Lisa Brewster said her son was a strong man. She seemed proud that even though he’d been mortally wounded, he somehow drove himself to the hospital.

Later, she wondered what would become of his white 2013 Ford Fusion. The car’s title is in her name.

Though authorities gave his home address as his mother’s house, he did not live there.

He dropped by every now and then.

He recently moved into an apartment nearby, but Lisa Brewster didn’t know where.

“He lived that fast life. I tell you the truth,” she said. “He always made that fast money.”

Then she broke down.

“I don’t really know the people he hung around,” she said, unable to fight back tears. “I don’t even want to know them. But I would like to see whoever shot him brought to justice.”

There were two other people in Darian’s car when he was shot. The authorities said they were not wounded.

The phone call telling his mother that Darian was dead came from Bibb Coroner Leon Jones about 5:45 a.m.

Lisa Brewster was already up, about to dress for work.

What the coroner said didn’t register at first.

All she heard was that Darian had been shot.

“Then he said, ‘Darian is dead.’ … I dropped the phone.”

His death is the city’s third homicide this month, the 12th this year.

Lisa Brewster kept mentioning how her son was a good man, stressing how “he ... never … hurt … anybody.”

Then: “Oh, my God. My child.”

His birthday was next Saturday.

Darian would have turned 35.

Not too long ago, his mother let his $100,000 life insurance policy lapse.

She couldn’t afford the $88-a-month payments.

“Now,” she said, “I’ve got to struggle to try to bury him.”

This story was originally published August 20, 2016 at 7:09 AM with the headline "‘He lived that fast life,’ mother says of man fatally shot outside Macon lounge."