Childhood friend offers $100,000 reward in 1986 slaying of 13-year-old in Warner Robins

The unsolved murder of 13-year-old Chuckie Mauk in 1986 still haunts childhood friend Jason Cranford.

“The night he was shot, we’d all been riding our bicycles jumping this rail he’d built,” said Cranford, who now lives in Colorado. “I probably saw him about 30 minutes before he got shot.

“We were all riding our bicycles home. We split ways. I went to my house, and he went to the store,” he said.

Chuckie, a gregarious, blue-eyed teenager, was found face down in a pool of blood near that neighborhood grocery store where he’d ridden his bicycle to get some candy and gum about 8:15 p.m. Feb. 17, 1986. The gum and the store receipt were still in his hand.

“He got shot and a few minutes later, a couple of my other friends knocked on my bedroom window and told me what happened,” Cranford said.

On the anniversary of Chuckie’s death earlier this year, Cranford said he was deeply touched by a Facebook posting about Chuckie by another childhood friend.

That post, coupled with the fact that Cranford now has a 13-year-old son of his own, motivated Cranford to reconnect with nearly 30 childhood friends who also were shaken by Chuckie’s killing.

They agreed that something had to be done, and Cranford, who had the means, said he decided to offer up a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer.

Cathy Miller, Chuckie’s mom, connected Cranford with Fox News host and Macon native Nancy Grace, who launched her new show “Crime Stories with Nancy Grace” on Fox Nation earlier this year with an episode about the slaying.

Grace connected Cranford with CSI Atlanta, which created a reward fund with the $100,000 Cranford fronted, and established a tip line to ferret through information and relay that to Houston County sheriff’s investigators.

“I would like to find out who did it because Cathy Miller, Chuck’s mom, is getting older now, and we would really like to see her get some peace with this before she passes away,” Cranford said. “And the other issue is all the kids that lived in that neighborhood — there’s close to 30 of us — and it scarred all of us for life.

“We were never the same after that. It was all of our first experiences with death ... It’s something we’ve never forgotten our whole lives. So, I’d like to give all the kids in that neighborhood peace, too; satisfaction,” he said.

Cranford became fast friends with Chuckie in the third grade at Russell Elementary School. They were also in school together at Warner Robins Junior High School.

“He was great,” Cranford said. “He was probably the best BMX bicycle rider in our neighborhood.

“He was just fearless. He’d jump any ramp. He’d dirt jump. He was a just a brave little kid,” Cranford said.

Chanda Burch, whose Facebook post moved Cranford, said Chuckie was the first person she met as a new student in the fourth-grade at Russell Elementary School. They were also in the same junior high school.

“This was the kind of boy he was: He would walk me home from school every day and my house was a lot further than his house, and he’d walk me home and then he walked back to his house,” Burch said. “We would stop at the corner store and he would buy me a blow pop every day.”

They were childhood sweethearts.

“Back then, we didn’t have technology. So, we were always writing notes to each other, and he kept every note that I wrote him,” Burch said.

He kept those notes in his bedroom in a big jar that he later hid because he didn’t want his mom to read them, Burch said. But where they were hidden is unknown.

She, Cranford, other childhood friends and Chuckie’s mother were among those featured in the “Crime Stories with Nancy Grace” episode.

“It’s something that we’ve all been living with for 30-something years and we couldn’t do anything as children,” Burch said. “We were helpless. There’s nothing you could do, and we didn’t know what to do.

“And now, we’re older, we feel like like if the community could get together to keep pushing, and hopefully pushing the cops to do something, or just somebody to speak up and finally say something. It’s been so long. And it would just be beneficial and kind of therapeutic for everybody if we could just figure this out and do something, bring this person to justice,” she said.

The CSI Atlanta tip line can be reached by phone at 404-325-4646, or by email at CSIATLANTA@cbs46.com.