A Macon man claimed self-defense in his best friend’s death. Did jurors believe him?
A Macon man who fired a fatal shot from a motel balcony at a friend with whom he had quarreled moments earlier told the police a day or so after the 2018 killing that he had acted in self-defense.
But much of their clash and the subsequent shooting was recorded by security cameras, and the friend, fatally shot in the back from more than 100 feet away, appeared to be leaving the motel property when he was shot.
The victim, Tavares Lester, who was 38, collapsed and died in the driveway in front of the Econo Lodge at 1990 Riverside Drive on the afternoon of May 6, 2018.
The shooter, Rashad Marquez Mays, 29, later accused of murder, went on trial this week in Bibb County Superior Court. He did not testify.
Friday morning, a jury of seven women and five men, after deliberating for about three and a half hours over parts of two days, found Mays guilty of murder.
He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
There was some dispute at trial whether Lester had brandished a weapon during his argument with Mays. Witnesses said Lester had waved his arms in the air and, in the distance upon departing, yelled back at Mays, who was on the motel’s second floor, to “(expletive) me up.”
There was no clear evidence that Lester had held or waved a pistol of his own during the quarrel with Mays — though he may have had a revolver in the waistband of his shorts.
Was it self-defense?
Questioned by the police soon after his arrest, Mays had said that Lester, the best friend he called “T Man,” verbally threatened him that day.
Their argument, a shouting- and sometimes-shoving match on May 6, 2018, grew heated inside the second-floor room where Mays lived with his motel-clerk girlfriend. The dispute soon spilled into the breezeway outside the room.
Mays, during the questioning by the police, claimed that Lester had been involved in violent crimes, unsubstantiated endeavors that Mays said he wanted no part of. Mays claimed that triggered their feud and was part of the reason he wanted Lester to leave that day.
Mays also told a Bibb sheriff’s investigator during questioning that at one point while in his motel room with Lester, out of view of the motel’s surveillance cameras, that Lester had held a gun to his head.
Mays also said Lester often bullied him and that on the day of the shooting “I felt like I was in a hostage situation,” and that Lester, in essence, overstayed his welcome.
“Four years of being bullied came out in one day,” Mays told the investigator, a video recording of which was played for jurors on Wednesday.
Prosecutor Eric Z. Edwards, in his closing argument on Thursday, said the shooting’s impetus came down to Mays’ anger boiling over.
Mays, who stands 5-foot-5 and weighs about 170 pounds, was substantially smaller than the 6-foot-plus, 230-pound Lester.
“Mr. Lester is a giant compared to Mr. Mays,” Mays’ attorney, Melvin Raines II, told jurors at the beginning of the trial.
‘The only aggressor’
Edwards, the prosecutor, walked jurors through video footage of the shooting on Thursday. He said Lester was clearly leaving the motel, no longer a threat. Even so, Edwards said, an enraged Mays, armed with a gun, lashed out at Lester in the distance.
Edwards said Mays’ firing the deadly shot was vengeance, not self-preservation, and that it was as if Mays was saying, “This (pistol) makes me as big a man as you.”
“Mr. Mays is the aggressor ... the only aggressor,” the prosecutor said.
Lester was struck dead by a bullet that traveled some 130 feet before it hit him in the right side of his back and lodged in his heart. He died at the scene.
Mays fled before the cops arrived. He was driven away by an Uber driver who was staying at the motel.
Mays’ pistol was later found stashed beneath a shed at the Uber driver’s mother’s house near Bolingbroke. The pistol was hidden in a Folgers coffee can. (The Uber driver was later charged with hindering Mays’ apprehension.)
Edwards, in his closing argument, told jurors that if the shooting had been an act of self-defense, Mays would have had no reason to flee.
“The self-defense claim here,” Edwards said, “is almost entirely nonsensical.”