Man fatally shot by Macon cop had lengthy criminal past; once called judge ‘S.O.B.’

Larry Daniel Matthews, the man who was fatally shot during an encounter on Friday with a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy, got out of prison seven months ago.

His release on March 2 from the Macon Transitional Center came after serving less than two years of a five-year sentence for a 2013 crime involving the possession of burglary tools.

He later asked for a new trial but was denied, and in open court he called the judge in the case “a son of a b----.”

Matthews, who in the past was known to live in the Hightower Road area — about four blocks from where he is said to have confronted deputy Greg Ussery — had been to prison at least six different times dating to the early 1980s, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Matthews, who turned 57 last month, had convictions going back to the time he was 23, including prison terms for robbery, simple battery, robbery by snatching, possession of tools to commit crime and aggravated assault.

Preliminary accounts of Matthews’ death have said he was shot Friday afternoon in the 500 block of Colquitt Street, a side street that runs east of Houston Avenue, two blocks below Eisenhower Parkway.

Officials said Ussery, the 36-year-old deputy, answered a 3:30 p.m. call about a shoplifting at a nearby Family Dollar store.

The store, which overlooks Eisenhower, sits at the corner of Houston Avenue, two-tenths of a mile north and about a four-minute walk from where Matthews was shot.

Roughly half an hour after the call at Family Dollar, Ussery reportedly spotted the 5-foot-6, 170-pound Matthews, who fit the description of the shoplifting culprit, along Colquitt Street. There was some confrontation, authorities have said, and Ussery used his Taser during a struggle with Matthews.

“During the struggle, the suspect grabbed the deputy’s pepper spray and sprayed the deputy in the face,” sheriff’s officials noted in a statement about the episode. “With the deputy being sprayed and the struggle continuing, the deputy drew his firearm and fired at the suspect, striking him.”

The GBI has been investigating the incident.

During their agents’ canvassing of the area, they learned a woman at the scene had live-streamed a Facebook video of Matthews’ encounter with Ussery and narrated it as it unfolded.

“We saw the video that afternoon,” J.T. Ricketson, special agent in charge of the GBI’s Perry office, said Monday. “It doesn’t show much. … You really can’t see much at all, but we did identify another person that we were trying to locate that was standing in the street.”

Agents also were said to be collecting recordings of any 911 calls made about the shooting, as well as dispatch logs and police-radio transmissions from the incident.

As is routine in such matters, agents will go over Ussery’s sheriff’s office personnel files and check to see that his certifications were up to date.

Ricketson said Matthews’ body could be autopsied as early as Tuesday. Toxicology tests could help determine whether Matthews was on any drugs at the time of the deadly confrontation.

“In our interviews, we uncovered some kind of erratic-type behavior from (Matthews),” Ricketson said.

“When you’ve got somebody that’s being that combative and defeating the strong-arm, defeating the Taser, defeating the pepper spray … most people would have already gone to compliant behavior, and he was continuing to be combative. We’re just curious to see if he was under the influence. We don’t know, though. That’s why we do that examination.”

It wasn’t clear what items were shoplifted from the Family Dollar. A sheriff’s report of the theft was not available Monday.

Ricketson, though, said investigators found a couple of packs of Bic lighters and a packet of ramen noodles “in close proximity” to the shooting.

Matthews, who in the past had lived in Savannah, Atlanta and on Macon’s east side, died at the scene.

He was known to frequent the Houston Avenue corridor in and around the Broadway split south of downtown. Star Cornelious, who said she witnessed the shooting, said she believes Matthews lived in a boarding house just down from her place on Colquitt Street.

On Monday afternoon, a man walking along Third Street near a gravel lane where Matthews once lived told of seeing Matthews the day before the shooting. Matthews was headed to a scrap yard to sell aluminum cans he had gathered along roadsides and in trash bins. Some in the neighborhood said he may have been homeless.

“I just knew him when I’d see him,” James Ambers said. “I never had no problem out of him.”

Ambers said Matthews at one point lived near a vacant shoe shop on Second Street, just east of Jeff Davis and Telfair Streets.

“I don’t think he worked nowhere,” Ambers said.

Three and a half years ago in March 2013, Matthews was caught after illegally entering a house on Cynthia Avenue, seven blocks up Houston Avenue from Friday’s fatal shooting.

In that case, Matthews was charged with burglary for allegedly stealing metal. He also was accused of possessing burglary tools — in this case wire cutters.

In August 2014, he was found not guilty of the burglary, but jurors still convicted him for having the wire cutters and he was sentenced to five years in prison.

A year later, after asking for a new trial — a request that was denied — records show that Matthews mouthed off to a judge in Bibb Superior Court.

“The defendant continued to talk over the court and was being disrespectful,” Judge Tripp Self later wrote in an order declaring Matthews in contempt. “The court told the defendant he had the floor and that when he finished talking, the court would talk. After the defendant finished more points, he thanked the court for its time and the court began to leave the bench.”

It was then, records show, that Matthews — who also went by the alias “Larry King” — called the judge “a son of b----.”

Self asked Matthews to repeat himself, but Matthews refused. The judge asked Matthews again what he had said and Matthews replied, “If you didn’t hear it then it wasn’t meant for you to hear.”

Four years earlier, in April 2011, Matthews was acquitted of an allegation that he raped a 67-year-old Macon woman in March of 2010. He was convicted of battery in the case and sentenced to three years in prison.

Testimony in the alleged rape showed that Matthews and the woman had left a shot house together and gone to a home on Hightower Road. The next day, the woman reported that she’d been beaten and raped while she was intoxicated.

Matthews denied beating the woman and said the sex was consensual. Testimony was presented at trial that the woman was beaten, but when the woman testified, she said she didn’t recall what happened.

This story was originally published October 10, 2016 at 12:29 PM with the headline "Man fatally shot by Macon cop had lengthy criminal past; once called judge ‘S.O.B.’."