Macon man gets life in prison for 2018 murder triggered by feud over parking spaces
A Bibb County jury of six men and six women deliberated for about two hours on Thursday afternoon before convicting a 20-year-old Macon man of murder in a 2018 shooting on the city’s southeast side.
Dequavious Jamal “D.J.” Howard Sr. was later sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Prosecutors said the Sept. 15, 2018, killing of 30-year-old Michael Antwan Chapman was the culmination of a feud over parking spaces at the Pendleton Homes housing project on Houston Avenue, where Chapman lived.
The running argument was said to involve Chapman and the family of the mother of Howard’s son, who had clashed in the days prior to the killing.
Accounts have varied, but the dispute apparently reached a boiling point after Chapman and Howard’s son’s mother exchanged heated words and, according to some versions, Chapman tried to spit on her and may have swung at her while she was holding the child.
Investigators have said Chapman was later shot dead outside a friend’s house on Burke Street — several blocks south down Houston Avenue from Pendleton Homes — after Howard learned of the confrontation and sought to payback. As a prosecutor phrased it, Howard told Chapman, “You’re not gonna disrespect my baby’s mama,” in the seconds after shooting Chapman multiple times in the chest.
Howard’s lawyer argued that Howard wasn’t the shooter, that Howard wasn’t there. But a handful of witnesses put Howard at the scene and one testified at length that Howard was the killer he had seen firing the fatal shots at Chapman.
Though a couple of Howard’s acquaintances testified that he was at a cookout across town at the time of the shooting, a former girlfriend of Howard’s took the stand Wednesday and said she had dropped him off at the scene on Burke Street and driven away toward Rocky Creek Road moments before the killing.
Prosecutor Sandra G. Matson, prior to Howard’s sentencing, asked the judge to sentence Howard to the maximum — life without parole.
“He clearly is a danger to society,” she said, referring to an armed robbery charge that Howard still faces in another case.
After Howard declined the chance to speak, judge Howard Z. Simms informed the just-convicted man who had been 18 when the killing happened that he would be spending the rest of his life behind bars.
The trial, which lasted four days, was the county’s first murder trial in 15 months as the COVID-19 crisis halted such proceedings.
“The only good thing about the coronavirus pandemic was that I got a year off from having to sit in this room and look at dead bodies on that (television) screen and the young men (in this courtroom) who had killed them,” Simms said. “It’s depressing and it’s sad.”
A recording of a recent telephone call from the county jail was played in court Wednesday. Prosecutors said the call was orchestrated last weekend by Howard to influence a key witness in the case who was planning to testify that Howard was at the scene of the shooting.
Howard, prosecutors said, offered the daughter of the witness and the witness herself $1,500 each in exchange for the witness coming to court and saying she had not seen him on Burke Street in the moments after Chapman was shot.
That effort to manipulate the trial’s outcome, Simms said, was the reason he decided to sentence Howard to life without parole.
“Son, it’s a sad day in this room for everybody in it,” the judge said.
“Sending you to the penitentiary may not stop the next guy or the one after that or the one after that. But word needs to get out: We’re back in business down here. ... I can’t stop other people from killing people, but I can stop you from doing it again in this town.”