Witnesses testify in Macon murder trial. ‘My life is on the line by being here.’
There have been just over 100 killings in Bibb County since the Saturday evening in September 2018 when 30-year-old Michael Antwan Chapman was gunned down.
Chapman had pulled up at a friend’s place off Houston Avenue in southeast Macon and the two were comparing notes on 1989 Chevrolet Caprices — so-called “box Chevys,” which they were both fond of — when someone strode up and shot Chapman dead.
On Wednesday in Bibb Superior Court, testimony began in the murder trial of the young man accused of killing Chapman. It was the first such testimony here in 15 months in the wake of the COVID-19 shutdown that halted most criminal proceedings.
If prosecutors’ contentions are correct, Chapman’s slaying stemmed from a running feud with some of his neighbors for hogging parking spaces at the Pendleton Homes housing project where Chapman lived.
And, more precisely, from a supposed run-in he had with one of those neighbors, the girlfriend of Dequavious Jamal “D.J.” Howard Sr., who days later allegedly shot and killed Chapman.
Prosecutor Sandra G. Matson, in her opening remarks to jurors, said the girlfriend — the mother of Howard’s little boy — had been known to pack the parking lot outside her family’s apartment by letting friends park there and hang out, leaving little or no room for other residents.
At one point, Matson said, Chapman’s wife confronted the girlfriend but nothing seemed to help.
Then one day prior to the shooting, which happened several blocks to the south down Houston Avenue past Rocky Creek Road on Burke Street, Matson said Chapman himself crossed paths with the girlfriend outside their apartments while she was holding her son, and that “the words got ... heated between them.”
Matson said some people familiar with the episode claimed that Chapman may have tried to slap the girlfriend and that one of them may have spit on or tried to spit on the other.
Matson said that after Chapman was killed the girlfriend’s mother told investigators that her daughter had told Howard about her altercation with Chapman, thus setting into motion the men’s fatal encounter.
For on the evening of Sept. 15, 2018, a few days later, Matson said, Howard showed up on Burke Street where Chapman was talking cars with his friend.
Referring to Howard and apparently to statements that investigators obtained from people who were on Burke Street the evening of the killing, Matson in her opening remarks to jurors on Wednesday said Howard shot Chapman multiple times with a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol and afterward told his bullet-riddled victim, “You’re not gonna disrespect my baby’s mama.”
“(The words) came out of the mouth of that man,” Matson went on, motioning to Howard at the defense table behind her, “just seconds after he filled Michael Chapman full of lead. ... It’s ridiculous. It’s sad. The only disrespectful thing is to the life of Michael Chapman.”
Matson said a woman who later testified that she saw Howard walking away after the shooting had told an investigator, possibly upon hearing word on the street afterward, that the killing was “all about that baby-mama drama.”
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The case against Howard hinges largely on eyewitness testimony from a couple of people who say they saw him at the scene, one whom described herself as his “side chick” and who said she dropped Howard off at the scene, at his request, moments before the killing.
Another prosecution witness, a man who said he was a close acquaintance of Howard’s, said was also a close friend of Chapman’s. In fact, he was the Chevy Caprice buff who Chapman was visiting the evening of the shooting. He testified that he saw Howard walk up to Chapman, as if to shake hands with him, and then open fire.
The man admitted first telling the police that he hadn’t seen what happened, that his head was under the hood of his Chevy when the fatal shots were fired. He said he had feared retaliation and not been fully honest at first, but that he later told the cops what he had seen, that Howard was the killer.
Howard’s attorney, Stanley W. Schoolcraft III, seized on the inconsistency, having based much of his defense on what he deemed the unreliable, changing accounts of prosecution witnesses. His examples included those of the woman who mentioned the “baby-mama drama,” who said her memory of the shooting’s immediate aftermath may have been clouded because at the time she was a methamphetamine addict.
Even so, during Schoolcraft’s cross examination of the one witness who fingered Howard as the shooter, the man was adamant about what he said he saw.
Howard, the man recalled, had walked up to Chapman and said, “’I don’t play that (expletive),’ and he shot that man.”
He added, “My life [is] on the line now by being here.”
“Really?” Schoolcraft asked.
“This the street, man,” the witness said. “We live in the street.”
Testimony was expected to resume Thursday morning.
This story was originally published May 13, 2021 at 10:57 AM.