Woman found shot to death, lying in shattered glass at Macon motel, report says
The man accused of killing a woman found lying nude in shattered glass with a gunshot wound to her back outside a west Macon motel room told authorities she tried to rob him, according to details from a Bibb County sheriff’s report.
In the moments after Ashley Ann Wease was found gunned down in front of room 240 at the EconoLodge Inn & Suites on Chambers Road, sheriff’s deputies chased down the man suspected of killing her.
As the suspect, Jerome Christopher Miller, was being detained in a deputy’s patrol car, Miller reportedly said the woman “was trying to rob me, man.”
Miller, 28, has been arrested on a murder charge in the 37-year-old woman’s slaying, which happened Saturday morning.
The sheriff’s deputy who first arrived noted seeing “shattered glass surrounding a white female in front of room 240 laying unclothed face down.”
The deputy also noticed a black pistol lying on the pavement next to the room’s door.
About that time, the deputy spotted a black SUV wheeling past and headed toward Eisenhower Parkway at the Interstate 475 interchange. The deputy caught up with the SUV and arrested the driver, later identified as Miller.
Wease’s slaying, which appears to be the city’s seventh homicide of the year, happened in an area of discount motels known for drug deals and prostitution.
Sheriff’s officials said in an email to The Telegraph on Thursday that the motive for the shooting appears to involve “prostitution and drug interaction.”
The low-cost inns and extended-stay lodgings along the freeway have in recent months been the scene of a law enforcement crackdown on illicit activity.
In January, sheriff’s officials announced some two dozen arrests at the motels, many of the cases involving drug trafficking.
Miller, who was being held without bond in the Bibb Jail, has past run-ins with the law, including burglary and escape convictions that landed him in prison from 2014-17.