Argument at Church’s Chicken ends in shooting. Now the manager is headed to prison.

As quitting time drew near, Louis Jackson argued with his manager at the Church’s Chicken on Georgia Avenue, where both men worked in July 2015.

A short time later, the 31-year-old Jackson rode up Vineville Avenue in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car. His manager, Kaishawn Conover, followed behind them in his Chevrolet Tahoe.

At the intersection of Vineville and Corbin avenues — not far from Vineville Academy — Jackson told his girlfriend to stop. He got out and went to the driver’s side of Conover’s car, where the men argued some more, prosecutor John Regan said Monday.

Then Conover fired several shots.

When Bibb County deputies arrived, Jackson was in the road with people trying to perform CPR on him.

Conover, 24, pleaded guilty to aggravated assault Monday during a hearing in Bibb County Superior Court. As part of a plea deal, he was sentenced to 20 years, eight of them in prison.

His attorney, Bobby Bearden, argued that nothing would have happened if Jackson had not gotten out of his girlfriend’s car.

If the case had gone to trial, he said he would have argued that Conover acted in self-defense.

“I’m asking for you to give him another chance,” Bearden asked Judge Howard Simms.

Addressing the judge, Conover said, “This was an accident, sir.”

After serving a prison stint for his part in a 2010 fight on Macon’s Austin Avenue that left a man pistol-whipped, Conover said he had worked to change his life.

At the time of the July 18, 2015, shooting, he was working two jobs and was “on the right track,” Conover said.

“You kind of jumped that track with this,” Simms told him.

This story was originally published June 26, 2017 at 3:42 PM with the headline "Argument at Church’s Chicken ends in shooting. Now the manager is headed to prison.."