Paralyzed gunshot victim wheeled into court on gurney to testify against accused shooter
Darius Rozier was wheeled into court on a gurney, his head propped just enough for the jury to see his face.
Rozier, shot in the midsection two years ago in what prosecutors describe as a midnight marijuana deal that turned into an armed robbery, was left paralyzed from about the waist down.
He was in Bibb County Superior Court on Wednesday to testify against the man who allegedly shot him in the wee hours of Feb. 9, 2017.
Rozier gripped a courtroom microphone in one hand as he described the episode, which happened on the front porch of his mother’s house on Bloomfield Road in deep southwest Macon.
Rozier, 27, said he occasionally sold weed, and that night a prospective weed buyer, a guy he didn’t know, showed up with some friends of Rozier’s to buy a couple of ounces. The deal was to earn Rozier about $200.
The stranger who’d come for the weed was identified by police as Denyke Trayvon Glenn.
Glenn, 23, is the man on trial for allegedly shooting Rozier.
Glenn is also charged with armed robbery and for supposedly participating in a street gang.
Glenn was freed on bond after his arrest in connection with Rozier’s shooting and has since been linked to two more incidents involving gunfire, authorities said. Glenn was jailed earlier this month on charges that he shot a man at a west Macon motel on April 30.
Bibb sheriff’s investigators have said that a week before that, on April 22, Glenn shot at his father during at disturbance at Extraordinary Detail, a car-cleanup shop on Houston Avenue.
On Wednesday in court, Glenn looked on from the defense table as Rozier told jurors he was certain that Glenn was the man who shot him.
The scene was as a stark reminder of the toll violent crime has taken here: one young man, Glenn, was led in wearing shackles; another, Rozier, was rolled in, lying flat on a gurney, his life, as prosecutors have put it, “shattered.”
Rozier, who cannot sit for long in a wheelchair because of the damage his wounds caused, testified that he sold marijuana on occasion, “but not many times.”
The night he was shot, he said he had met his friends and Glenn on his front porch. Rozier said he was putting weed on a scale to weigh it when “I turned my back for like two seconds” and, in a flash, Glenn pulled a gun.
“You know what the (expletive) it is,” Rozier said the gunman told him before squeezing the 9mm pistol’s trigger.
“My body instantly went into shock,” Rozier recalled. “I guess because (the bullet) hit my spine. ... I couldn’t move my body or nothing.”
He later added, “I thought I was dead.”
Rozier, who was unconscious for a few days, spent a couple of weeks in a Macon hospital before moving on to one in Atlanta that specializes in spinal injuries.
Asked by prosecutor Sandra Matson to describe his condition, Rozier said, “I can’t use my bladder. I can’t do my own bowel movements. ... I can’t do nothing on my own really. I have to rely on somebody to help me.”
Closing arguments in the case are expected to begin Thursday.