Courtroom video: Judge blasts Macon gangsters for murder of sheriff’s clerk

In the moments after Addonis Xavier Rhodes and Curtis Dewayne Jackson were convicted Tuesday of murder in the 2015 shooting death of Vernard Mays, the killers sat before Bibb County Superior Court Judge Howard Z. Simms.

Before sentencing Rhodes and Jackson, Simms lectured the pair and told them they were part of the reason for the city’s crime woes.

Here is a transcript of some of what the judge said:

“This community is bleeding to death, and it’s bleeding to death because of people like the two of you. You can come up here and you can tell me all these stories. I’ll be straight-up honest with you. My heart does not bleed for either one of you. It bleeds for this lady (Vernard Mays’ mother), who held her dying son in her arms because you two and three others showed up looking for guns.

“You can give me all of the crap stories that you want to give me. If y’all hadn’t have been there that young man would be alive. And he (Mays) 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 me — have had enough of you. Last night was our 32nd murder this year.

“Both of you have some responsibility for that. Because you all contribute to the culture that makes that OK. Now I can’t follow people around 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.”