Coroner searches for relatives of Macon’s latest homicide victim as cops seek suspect
Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones on Thursday released the name of a 51-year-old man found shot to death early Wednesday outside an auto-parts shop on Macon’s west side.
The victim, Ernest Isaiah Hemphill, most recently lived at a boarding house at 3794 Flamingo Drive off Houston Avenue, Jones said.
As of Thursday evening, the coroner had been unable to locate the dead man’s next of kin.
Jones said Hemphill, originally from Ohio, had been living in Macon for much of the past decade.
In summer 2013, Hemphill was released from prison here after serving a 15-year sentence for a Cobb County armed robbery, according to Georgia Department of Corrections records. He was convicted of the July 1998 crime in 1999 and served the end of his term at the Macon Transitional Center.
Other past addresses for Hemphill in Macon include Recreation Road, Pio Nono Circle and Guyton Street.
He has also lived in Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio.
Bibb sheriff’s officials have divulged little about Hemphill’s slaying and have yet to publicly identify a suspect.
According to a statement from sheriff’s officials, the shooting happened “sometime before 12:35 a.m.” Wednesday when Hemphill was found “unresponsive” in the parking lot of Advance Auto Parts at 3230 Mercer University Drive.
He had been shot in the “upper body,” the statement said.
Hemphill’s death is the county’s eleventh homicide of 2020 — a toll which includes a vehicular homicide — and will likely be the eighth case considered a murder. (The county’s two other violent deaths have resulted in manslaughter charges.)