Father of Macon’s first 2020 homicide victim says son was a veteran, a ‘good guy’
The shooting death Monday night of an east Macon man happened along a well-traveled thoroughfare in a neighborhood not often touched by violent crime.
On Tuesday, the events that may have led to the death of 37-year-old Michael Alvin Lewis were still not clear.
What the authorities have said is that his death — Bibb County’s first homicide of 2020 — happened about 9:30 p.m.
A man who lives at 771 Oak Hill Court at the corner of Forest Hill Road, one of the main drags through Macon’s north side, heard what cops described in a statement as “several shots fired outside of his home.”
Lewis, the fatally wounded man, was said to have been found lying on the front lawn, which sits less than half a mile south of Forest Hill’s busy intersection at Northside Drive.
Lewis died at the scene of multiple gunshot wounds, Bibb Coroner Leon Jones told The Telegraph.
A sheriff’s deputy on the scene late Monday said the shooting appeared “random,” but what prompted it was a mystery at least early on.
Lewis, a father of three who was identified not long after the shooting, had for the past year or so lived off and on with his father in a duplex on Cannon Drive off Jeffersonville Road on the county’s far east side.
“It’s hit me hard,” his father, Alvin Lewis, told the Telegraph on Tuesday morning as he stood on his front porch. “He’s my child. ... I’m still digesting it.”
Alvin Lewis said his son, a native of Rome, Georgia, who had served in the Air Force, had recently gotten out of the hospital and had been diagnosed with lupus.
“He coded when we got him up to the hospital, so he’s been through hell,” Alvin Lewis said.
“Being his father, I told him, ‘As long as I got a roof over my head, you got one.’”
Alvin Lewis said as best he knew, Michael, or Mike as his son was known, had been going to see a friend Monday night, but his father wasn’t sure where.
“To me,” Alvin Lewis said of his son, “whatever happened ... didn’t have nothing to do with him. But I don’t know.”
Mike Lewis was on disability, his father said, and had worked as a cook at the Rookery restaurant in downtown and at Bonefish Grill.
“A good guy, you know?” Alvin Lewis said. “The last work he did he was a chef. He had been to chef school.”
This story was originally published January 21, 2020 at 9:43 AM.