‘A sad day for Macon.’ Teen shooting victim is city’s 50th homicide of year
A 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head on Sunday in a drive-by shooting in east Macon died Thursday.
The victim, Jamerian Lawrence, who had been in intensive care at a city hospital for four days, was pronounced dead about 2 p.m., Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones said.
Lawrence’s death marks a grim milestone, the county’s 50th homicide in a record year of violence that has seen more people slain than the previous modern-day high of 43 in 1992.
“It’s a sad day for Macon, Georgia,” Jones told The Telegraph. “I’ve never seen 50 homicides in Macon. Jesus, I doesn’t make sense.”
Sunday shooting
Lawrence was critically wounded shortly after 4:30 on Sunday afternoon.
A witness said he had been on the porch of a house at 692 Center St. in the Fort Hill neighborhood when a car cruised past, shots were fired and Lawrence was struck by bullets “multiple times in the upper body,” Bibb County sheriff’s officials said in a statement.
The shooting happened at Center Street’s intersection with Woolfolk Street, just north of Emery Highway and Coliseum Drive in an area long plagued by crime.
According to an initial incident report obtained by The Telegraph on Tuesday, the victim’s father, who had been in the house, told the cops that he hadn’t seen what happened.
He said he heard a single gunshot “and ran outside and found his son on the ground,” the report said.
A sheriff’s deputy who answered the call pulled up to find the victim’s father “covered in blood” and trying to hold the victim, who according the report was shot in the back of the head.
A single gunshot
A 23-year-old woman told investigators that she been on the porch when “all of a sudden she heard one gunshot,” the report went on, adding that the woman “ducked to the ground” and realized the teen had been wounded.
The woman later told the cops that she had seen “a brown or tan vehicle with a male hanging out of the passenger window with a big gun.”
Investigators said a suspect in the shooting, Semaj D. Martin, 18, turned himself in early Monday.
Martin, whose Magnolia Drive address lies about nine blocks east of the shooting scene, was questioned and later jailed on an aggravated assault charge.
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.