Holed-up shooting suspect arrested by Bibb SWAT after two-hour standoff
A two-hour standoff with a man who allegedly shot another man in Macon’s Payne City neighborhood ended there shortly after 11 a.m. Tuesday when sheriff’s deputies surrounded a pair of houses and the shooting suspect bolted out a side door.
The episode began just before 9 a.m. when the cops were called to a shooting and found a man wounded, shot once in the hip, after an argument outside a house near the corner of Brookdale Avenue and Short Street. The area lies a couple of blocks south of Vineville Avenue in the heart of the old mill village between a rail line and Roff Avenue.
The victim, William Cecil Smith, 30, was reportedly in “stable” condition at a city hospital Tuesday afternoon.
An hour of so after the shooting, Bibb County Sheriff David Davis arrived at the scene and told reporters that the man who did the shooting ran off and was believed to be holed up in a house on Green Street just west of Freedom Park.
A sheriff’s negotiator speaking over a bullhorn tried several times to coax the suspect out, telling him, “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Deputies on the county’s SWAT squad at one point busted into a house on Green Street where the suspect was said to live with his mother, but he wasn’t there. A few minutes later, at another house across the street that cops were also watching, the SWAT team barged in.
“As the team was going in the front door,” Davis said, “the individual was trying to make an escape out the side door. There were deputies right there (who) took him right into custody without any incident.”
The suspect, identified as Jerome Dewayne Hewitt, 40, was charged with aggravated assault in connection with the earlier shooting, officials said. The sheriff said Hewitt was not armed when he was caught.
In May 1999, Hewitt was convicted of aggravated assault for his role in an incident the previous October and sentenced to serve eight years on probation. Details of that crime were unclear.
Nearly five years later in March 2004, Hewitt was arrested for multiple times failing to report to his probation officer and later sent to prison until October 2007 to serve the remainder of his sentence.
Less than six months after his release, in April 2008, Hewitt was arrested and jailed on aggravated assault charges related to the state’s family violence statute.
He later, in a negotiated plea, pleaded guilty to that charge, which according to an indictment, involved Hewitt punching a woman in the face, “ripping her earring out of her right ear, holding a pillow to her face and a knife to her throat.”
He was sentenced to serve five years on probation.
This story was originally published May 26, 2020 at 12:40 PM.