Macon murder toll could easily eclipse modern-day high if record pace continues
It was just after 10 a.m. on the Fourth of July when a woman met with a sheriff’s deputy on Azalea Drive.
The cops had been called to a house there off Ayers Road, half a mile from where Napier Avenue joins Forsyth Road in north Macon, about what the deputy’s write-up of the incident would later describe as “possible threats being made.”
The woman told the deputy that the father of her children, Davius Johnson, had sent her a threatening text message. She said that she and Johnson had been chatting about their children and about how she was having a holiday gathering at her place on Azalea Drive later that day.
The woman, 29, showed the sheriff’s deputy a cellphone screenshot of the couple’s text messages in which Johnson, 30, was said to have told her to, as the deputy put it in his report, “Enjoy because today may be (your) last day on earth.”
The woman went on to say that while talking to Johnson by phone at some point earlier that he had told her “he will come over to her house and shoot her in front of her company,” the incident report said.
The latter remark was not recorded and no one else had heard Johnson’s supposed statement, the deputy’s report concluded, and there was “not enough probable cause” to arrest Johnson.
The deputy said he gave her numbers to a women’s shelter and “advised (her) to stop all forms of communication with Davius.”
Less than 15 hours and multiple gunshots later, two people at the woman’s Independence Day party on Azalea Drive would be dead.
One of them was Davius Johnson.
A record pace
Johnson’s death in the small hours of July 5 would mark a troubling milestone.
His death that night along with that of a man named Notorious Williams — who is thought to have exchanged gunfire with Johnson, fatally wounding Johnson in a shootout inside the woman’s house before Williams was then allegedly shot dead by another man outside — would mark the city’s 30th and 31st homicides of 2020.
The slayings came less than a week after the year’s midway point.
Late Friday night, 16-year-old Devaun Patton died after he was shot in the parking lot of a Macon Family Dollar.
The killings pushed the city’s violent-death toll to a total that eclipsed the annual homicide tally for every full year except one over the past decade (Forty-two people died violent deaths here in all of 2018, one shy of the modern-day high of 43 in 1992).
The most people to die in Bibb County at the hands of another in any other single year since 2010 were the 30 people slain in 2017. A rate of three killings per month for the rest of this year, July included, would put the 2020 death toll at 47 homicides.
It is difficult if not impossible to pinpoint precise reasons for homicide-rate increases. But Macon was already on a record pace for killings in the first two months of 2020, with four killings each month in January and February. From March on, from around the time the coronavirus pandemic set in, there have been 24 homicides.
‘Cycle of revenge’
Some experts suggest that pressures from the COVID-19 pandemic may at very least be playing a tangential role.
John Roman, a crime-pattern specialist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, said that while comprehensive data on U.S. homicides won’t be available until next year it is a safe bet that the trend in Macon fits the national picture.
“Reviewing data from a number of big cities that report in near real-time, it is fair to conclude that homicide and shootings are up in many places, even while violent crime is down overall,” Roman wrote in an email to The Telegraph.
He has seen many explanations about why this may be, but that the simplest one seems most apt. Homicides, Roman said, already most often involves victims and culprits who know one another and live close together.
“COVID-19 restrictions, and general fear of exposure ... have led people to be near their home more of the time — even in places that haven’t necessarily issued stay-at-home orders for long time periods. This is true for young people at the highest risk of shooting someone or being shot — they have less work, less school, fewer training program hours,” Roman wrote. “It’s a recipe for violence. Now, layer on top of that homicide being up before the pandemic and that intensifies disputes and the cycle of revenge and retaliation.”
Causes hard to pinpoint
Dr. Monique Davis-Smith, a Macon family physician who works with young people as a volunteer with the Mentor’s Project of Bibb County, said in a recent interview that indirectly at least the pandemic could be a factor in the violence.
She said pressures put on people already hard pressed to make ends meet have, amid the COVID-19 outbreak, pushed people “not just near the margin but over the edge with the reduction in salary and income, and some of this kind of social distancing. ... Particularly (affecting) the younger, millennial group, (with) a loss of social, physical connection with their peers and friends probably increases stresses.”
She said that while that stress may be profound, she can’t from her perspective say that it has contributed to an uptick in homicides.
An increase in alcohol sales and use has been reported and Davis-Smith wondered if there might be a “relationship to be using more alcohol and decreasing their inhibitions as it is related to crime.”
Other stresses the doctor noted were food insecurities and housing insecurities compounded by the economic affects of the pandemic. She said visits to doctor’s offices have dropped and chronic diseases have gone unchecked.
Hardships brought on by children being out of school, though not necessarily during the summer months, may contribute undue strains.
“The whole learning experience at home. You know, you have one laptop for seven kids. ... Or you have a laptop but you don’t have Wi-Fi,” Davis Smith said. “All of that just gives idle time that challenges mental health, challenges physical health because many people are not getting as much physical activities. And it may or may not ... directly impact what you’re seeing in the homicides, but I could imagine there is some relationship to that.”
Bibb Sheriff’s Capt. Shermaine Jones, who oversees the county’s homicide investigations, said there were no trends or patterns that could be deemed “a reasoning” for the increase in homicides here.
Asked if it were possible that stresses amid the coronavirus pandemic may have contributed and whether there were any instances of that, Jones said in an email that there were no known cases involving such factors.
“I can’t say that the stress level is not a real thing as COVID-19 is a major part of our society as of the last few months,” Jones wrote.
He instead attributes the increased death toll to arguments that get out of hand.
“Conflict resolution is something that society has lost sight of. Many of the issues that factored into the homicides could have been resolved,” Jones noted. “It seems that empathy, compassion, and a simple agree-to-disagree are actions people do not want to follow.”
As for the homicide-average increase over the past five years, Jones said, “If we could get more people to care about their neighbors and neighborhoods it could help the fight against violent crime and hopefully bring those averages down.”