He’s accused of killing a Macon man and arranging a hit on only witness — his ex-wife
When Javaris A. Brown was killed the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday 2018, his slaying was the fifth in what would be a near-record-breaking year of 41 homicides in Macon, the most bloodshed Bibb County had seen in a quarter-century.
Shot three times in the head and once in the neck, Brown, 33, was found slumped over dead in the driver’s seat of his girlfriend’s Hyundai Sonata.
The car, with one of its side windows blown out by gunfire, was sitting near an intersection off Napier Avenue, a few blocks east of Central High School.
A woman driving to get pizza for a Super Bowl party couldn’t help noticing the Hyundai and the body inside it as she wheeled onto a curb to squeeze past. She kept going but called 911.
The bloodstained car was blocking traffic at Carling Avenue, which runs along an embankment overlooking the southbound lanes of Interstate 75 near the northern edge of Mercer University’s campus.
Investigators would later learn that Brown — described by prosecutors as a part-time marijuana peddler who also dealt pills — had been robbed at gunpoint the day before and lost $800 in the heist. It was cash Brown couldn’t afford to lose, money he owed a drug supplier, prosecutors contend.
The cops would also be told by people close to Brown that Brown believed the robbery had been a set-up by a man he knew named “Keith,” who was later identified by detectives as Keith Beddingfield Jr.
Six days later, Beddingfield, who was 25 at the time, would be arrested and charged with murder in the killing of Brown.
On Tuesday, two years to the day of Brown’s Feb. 4, 2018, death, prosecutors in Bibb Superior Court began presenting their case against Beddingfield to a jury of nine men and three women.
There is no physical evidence linking Beddingfield to the crime scene, and so far no clear apparent motive.
But prosecutors claim that after being robbed, Brown had asked around about getting a gun to get back at Beddingfield.
Prosecutors also contend that at least one person, Beddingfield’s former wife, has placed Beddingfield as being inside the car the next day when Brown was killed.
The place where Beddingfield allegedly met Brown the Sunday afternoon sits along a lightly-traveled stretch of Napier, in an area known as “Duncan Block,” named for an adjacent side street in a spot with a history of drug and gang activity.
Prosecutors contend that Beddingfield’s then-wife, Karen Morton, drove him to meet Brown, and that she heard gunfire after her husband sat down in Brown’s borrowed Hyundai.
A man who lives nearby testified Tuesday that he had to hurry out of the street as an SUV matching the description of Morton’s green Ford Explorer blew by moments after the shooting.
On Wednesday afternoon, as more than two dozen of Brown’s family members looked on from the gallery in Judge Howard Z. Simms’ courtroom, Morton took the stand to testify against her ex-husband.
She still faces murder charges for allegedly driving Beddingfield to the alleged meeting with Brown, but the charges may be dropped in exchange for her testimony.
Morton, 42, said that on the day of the shooting she drove Beddingfield to Carling Avenue and that Brown wheeled up in the Hyundai a few minutes later. She said Beddingfield got in the car with Brown and that she soon heard Brown yell, “Man, I don’t have anything!”
Then she said she heard gunfire — three or four shots.
Morton testified that Beddingfield then got back in the Explorer she was driving and asked her whether she had heard anything.
No, she said.
“I was scared,” Morton told prosecutor Sandra Matson.
Morton said Beddingfield had with him a bag of something that may have been drugs from Brown’s car, and that they then went home to east Macon.
But before they did, Morton said, they circled back to the car because Beddingfield had left his burner cellphone in the car, which Morton said he then broke in half.
Prosecutor Jason Knowles in his opening statement Tuesday described Brown’s death as an “execution”
Knowles also spoke of a plot that Beddingfield allegedly hatched while in jail awaiting trial to stage a fake robbery at the dollar store where Beddingfield’s now-ex-wife, Morton, had worked, a scheme that involved a $1,000 hit that would result in Morton’s death.
“A thousand dollars, that’s all a human life was worth to Mr. Beddingfield. His own wife,” Knowles said. “He’s willing to do whatever it takes to avoid justice. ... He’s willing to put a hit out on his own wife because she’s the only one there.”
Though Beddingfield, now 27, is not on trial for allegedly conspiring from jail to have Morton killed, he still faces charges of criminal attempt to commit murder in an alleged scheme to arrange a hit on her.
On Wednesday afternoon, prosecutors played a recording of someone they say is Beddingfield calling Morton from jail to tell her to help stage an armed robbery at the Dollar General where she worked on Shurling Drive.
Morton testified she didn’t go through with the plan and instead quit her job.
Beddingfield’s lawyer, Gregory L. Bushway, told jurors that Morton is not to be believed, that she was “the very person that betrayed” her husband.
Bushway in his opening statement Tuesday declared the case as one of an “absence of evidence” and of “betrayal. ... Drugs and betrayal.”
He said Morton had turned on her husband and “decided to trade his life for hers.”
On Thursday, prosecution witnesses included a former jailhouse acquaintance of Beddingfield’s who testified that Beddingfield had in a note asked that he lie about Beddingfield’s whereabouts the day of Brown’s slaying.
Another prosecution witness, Kelvin D. Johnson, 45, testified that Beddingfield had called him from jail to arrange the hit on Karen Morton.
“He said that (Morton) folded on him, that she had told on him,” Johnson said, and that Beddingfield had offered him as much as $1,000 to have her killed.
Testimony had yet to conclude at presstime Thursday.
This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 5:42 PM.