Man charged in Macon infant’s gun death was arrested in 2013 Savannah-area bank heist
A bullet that claimed the life of a 1-year-old boy Sunday night in a shooting at a west Macon apartment came from a gun that investigators say was in the hands of a Chatham County man who wasn’t supposed to have one.
John Demetrius Simmons, 28, of Garden City near Savannah, was arrested and jailed in the hours after the 11 p.m. gunshot that left the infant, Monterrious Brown, dead.
Simmons, charged with murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, was being held without bond Tuesday in the Bibb County jail.
In 2013, Simmons and three other men were charged in the holdup of a Wells Fargo bank in Garden City, a Savannah police spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday. The disposition of the charges Simmons faced in that case were unclear, the spokeswoman said, but Chatham Superior Court records show he had been accused of armed robbery.
Sunday night shooting
As for the events that led to the child’s death Sunday night, a full description of what happened inside Apt. 211-B at Chambers Cove Apartments has yet to emerge.
However, details gleaned from a preliminary incident report and from Bibb sheriff’s news releases reveal that Simmons and his girlfriend, apparently the child’s aunt, had gone to the apartment to do laundry.
According to sheriff’s officials, Monterrious’ mother, TyCeanna Brown, heard a gunshot after leaving the room where the boy was and returned to find him shot once in his “upper body.”
She rushed him to a city hospital, where he died.
“Investigators discovered that it was a gun that Simmons had ... that was involved” in the child’s shooting, a sheriff’s statement read.
A deadly year
The type of gun was not noted in the report.
A sheriff’s deputy who went to the scene on Chambers Cove Drive wrote in a report that a neighbor there heard screaming and then “observed a male walk out of the apartment with a gun and (place) it inside of a vehicle. ... (The neighbor) also stated that he observed a baby lying on the front room floor of the apartment.”
The infant’s death was the second Bibb gun death in three weeks involving children 8 years old or younger.
“You have to be careful with guns around kids,” Bibb Coroner Leon Jones said Tuesday.
The county appears to be continuing a troubling pace when it comes to homicides.
Last year, a record one for violent deaths here when 51 people died at the hands of someone else, the county’s seventh slaying of the year happened Feb. 15.
Monterrious’ death on Sunday, the same date, was the county’s sixth of 2021.
This story was originally published February 17, 2021 at 12:00 AM.