‘Gang of morons’ botched fool’s errand. Innocent Bibb sheriff’s clerk was shot dead.
The death of Vernard Mays in the fall of 2015 has to be one of this city’s most hapless, most random and most brainless killings in recent memory.
The odds of it happening at all are difficult to grasp, and more details of the slaying’s senselessness emerged Tuesday in a courtroom here. A 21-year-old man pleaded guilty to his role in the fatal folly, one that is a tragic blend of dumb, rotten luck and, as the local sheriff put it Tuesday, the ill-fated act of armed and “moronic” young men running an errand for their gang.
Mays, who was 23 and a warrant clerk at the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office, lived with his mother on Second Street south of downtown, mere blocks from the sheriff’s department. The house happened to sit near the scene of a car wreck that happened Oct. 27, 2015.
The authorities have since said that moments after the wreck, before the police got there, some of the people in the car stashed a book bag with a gun and drugs in it in the yard outside Mays’ house. The people, some of whom were sent to the hospital, allegedly later told members of a gang known as “1012” to retrieve the bag.
Prosecutors say those supposed gang members — five in all, each later charged with murdering Mays, whom they apparently didn’t even know — did just that.
Unbeknownst to them, however, someone else they knew had already fetched the bag. So there was no bag to pick up. But the allegedly armed quintet was unaware. Prosecutors say that when the young men went to Mays’ house, they looked around, found nothing outside and confronted him.
Mays said he knew nothing about a gun or a book bag, and when he tried to shut his door, the young men allegedly fired shots through the door, one of which struck Mays in the groin and killed him. It isn’t clear who fired the deadly shot.
In court on Tuesday at the guilty-plea hearing, one of the alleged gunmen, Michael Dewayne Hardy Jr., said he still can’t see any reason why the killing happened. A prosecutor said Hardy told investigators that he shot “because everyone else was shooting.”
“I know what I did was wrong,” Hardy told the judge. Hardy said he chalked it up to being with “the wrong crowd.”
Hardy, who pleaded to being in a street gang and to aggravated assault for being one of the people who opened fire on the unarmed Mays, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In exchange for testimony against others in the case who have yet to be tried, that sentence could be trimmed to 20 years.
After hearing about Tuesday’s guilty plea, Bibb County Sheriff David Davis told The Telegraph that Mays' killing was “one of the more moronic acts of violence ... committed by a gang of morons. I’m just glad the wheels of justice are continuing to move.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2018 at 6:27 PM with the headline "‘Gang of morons’ botched fool’s errand. Innocent Bibb sheriff’s clerk was shot dead.."