Teen shoots teen. Judge finds him guilty. All leave court happy — including shooter

When it first made the news, it seemed like any old shooting.

A teenager had shot another teen at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun.

No one at the house where it happened seemed to know anything.

The cops sent out a statement about how the wounded teen had gone to the hospital.

The teen who’d done the shooting was arrested.

The case wasn’t mentioned again on TV or in the newspaper, though there was some mention of it on social media.

Jacques Houston, then a 16-year-old basketball player at Westside High School in Macon, sent a Facebook post from his hospital bed. The shotgun blast had fractured his hip. There was concern that he might not survive.

Rayshad “Shad” Durham, 17 at the time, had by then been charged with aggravated assault and locked up in the Bibb County jail.

“Free Shad,” Houston’s Facebook post said.

As it turned out, the two were friends.

They’d been playing video games at a house near Lake Wildwood one day after school a couple of weeks before Christmas 2015. Durham picked up a shotgun someone had left lying around. He pointed it toward Houston. Not knowing it was loaded, as Durham would later tell the police, he “pressed the trigger button.”

The gun fired. Houston was hit. A handful of children and other teens in the house panicked. Even so, a couple of them stanched Houston’s bleeding with a T-shirt and couch pillows.

The next day, Durham was charged with aggravated assault. The allegation is a serious one and can send someone to prison for up to 20 years. Such a charge often means a weapon was used to seriously hurt someone — or try to — often with the intent to murder or rob.

But as the facts of in case emerged, it became clear that Durham had intended no such thing. The shooting was an accident.

Even so, prosecutors had to ask: Was it still criminal? Was, in the eyes of the law, aiming a gun at someone not knowing whether it was loaded, pulling the trigger and blowing a hole in a person’s hip an illegal act?

The answer emerged Thursday afternoon in Bibb Superior Court where Durham went on trial.

The charges had been reduced to second-degree cruelty to children. Prosecutors offered to reduce them further — to misdemeanor reckless conduct — if Durham pleaded guilty.

Durham didn’t take the deal, and the case proceeded with Judge Howard Simms presiding over what is known as a bench trial. The judge serves as judge and jury. There are no jurors.

One witnesses took the stand and told how he remembered the teens were playing video games when the shooting happened. The witness said Durham dropped the shotgun as soon as it fired. “He didn’t really mean to shoot,” the witness said.

A sheriff’s investigator told how Durham had said the weapon “went off” when he pulled the trigger.

When it came Houston’s turn on the stand, a prosecutor asked him if it had hurt when he was shot.

Not really, Houston said. “I just felt numb.”

The prosecutor asked Houston about the teen who’d shot him.

“We’re still good friends,” Houston, now 18, said. “That’s not gonna change at all.”

He later added, “It was an accident.”

Still, prosecutors had to raise the question of negligence.

Houston had spent more than a week in the hospital. He can walk, but says he isn’t as smooth on the basketball court anymore.

When the judge rendered his decision, the lean, athletic Houston, dressed in a pink polo shirt, was seated in the back of the courtroom. Durham, meanwhile, was at the defense table in a gray dress shirt and glasses, his dreadlocked hair done up in a bun.

Simms, having read to the courtroom the definition of reckless conduct — misdemeanor reckless conduct in this case — began:

“This young man, the defendant, didn’t mean to shoot anybody. But what he did was also so profoundly stupid — picking up a gun that he didn’t know whether it was loaded or not, pointing it in the direction of somebody else and pulling ... the trigger.”

Simms noted that Houston nearly died. Simms went on to say that the reckless conduct statute could not have been more applicable in this case because “you could kind of call it ‘the profoundly stupid act’ infraction.”

The judge said he was certain Durham had not meant to hurt Houston. Simms said he wasn’t about to send Durham to prison.

“We’ve got enough people around here that shoot one another on purpose to fill up the jail,” the judge said.

He declared Durham guilty of reckless conduct and sentenced him to take a gun-safety course.

Then Simms reminded Durham, a high school senior, how lucky he was that Houston hadn’t died, and how fortunate he was to have a friend as understanding as Houston.

“We could all learn a lot from Mr. Houston,” the judge said. “Mr. Houston has every right in the world to hate your guts. You understand?”

Durham said he did.

“I can promise you,” Simms went on, referring to Houston’s social media post in support of Durham soon after the shooting, “if you shot me, I wouldn’t be sending you messages on Facebook.”

Court was adjourned.

Durham raised his glasses and wiped away tears.

This story was originally published September 21, 2017 at 6:47 PM with the headline "Teen shoots teen. Judge finds him guilty. All leave court happy — including shooter."