‘This community is bleeding to death,’ judge tells killers of Bibb sheriff’s clerk
Two Macon men were convicted of murder and gang charges Tuesday in the 2015 shooting death of a Bibb County Sheriff’s office warrant clerk.
Addonis Xavier Rhodes, 19, and Curtis Dewayne Jackson Jr., 25, were found guilty after jurors in Bibb Superior Court deliberated for about two hours.
Rhodes, who was 16 when the killing happened, was sentenced to life, a minimum of 30 years behind bars, while Jackson was sent away forever — life without parole.
The killing of warrant clerk Vernard Mays was among the most senseless gang-related assaults here in recent memory.
On the night of Oct. 27, 2015, Mays, 23, answered the back door at the Second Street home where he lived with his mother just south of downtown.
Prosecutors said five young men with ties to the Crips street gang were out in the yard looking for a book bag that contained guns and possibly drugs.
The bag had been stashed in the area earlier in the day in the moments after some associates of the gangsters were in a car wreck there at the intersection of Second and Ell streets. The bag had been ditched because, with rescuers and cops on the way to the wreck scene, the people the bag belonged to had been injured didn’t want to be caught with it or take it to the hospital with them.
However, unbeknownst to the five young men who’d gone hunting the book bag that night, someone else connected to the gang had already fetched it.
When Mays, who had been at work that day, told the gangsters that he didn’t know about any book bag, they apparently didn’t believe him and some of them opened fire on Mays, shooting him through the door. A bullet from a .40-caliber pistol struck him in the groin, killing him.
It isn’t clear who fired the shot that mortally wounded Mays, but prosecutors contend it was Rhodes.
Prosecutors at trial, which began last week, presented evidence that Jackson had gone to the Mays home with Rhodes and three other young men in tow. The others in the case have since pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for their testimony against Rhodes and Jackson.
“Welcome to Macon,” Bibb prosecutor Jason Martin told jurors as he began his closing argument Tuesday morning, “where you can’t open your door because you might get shot by the gang that stashed a gun in your bushes.”
Martin later mentioned how on Monday night here, another shooting death in the city, this one involving a teenage victim, marked Bibb County’s 32nd homicide of the year.
“How many more young people are gonna die before this community wakes up?” Martin asked.
Martin told the jurors to “send a message” to the city with guilty verdicts for Rhodes and Jackson.
In sentencing Rhodes and Jackson, Judge Howard Z. Simms also spoke of Macon’s violent-crime troubles.
“This community is bleeding to death,” the judge said, “and it’s bleeding to death because of people like the two of you.”
Simms, a former prosecutor, proceeded to give Rhodes and Jackson one of the lectures — scoldings may be the better word — that he has become known for since moving to the bench in 2011.
“You can give me all of the crap stories that you want to give me,” he said. “If y’all hadn’t have been there (that night) that young man would be alive. And he didn’t have anything to do with any of this. We — and when I say we, I’m talking about the people that live in this town — and we have had enough of you.”
The judge told Rhodes and Jackson that they were part of a criminal culture that seems to think killing is OK.
“Now I can’t follow people around,” Simms went on, “and make sure that they don’t kill one another. If I could, I would, but I can’t. What I can do, what I’m going to do, is to make sure that neither one of you kill anybody in my town ever again.”
This story was originally published September 18, 2018 at 3:03 PM.