These 7 square miles have become Macon’s deadliest, homicide-torn area
While there is almost never a pattern to where exactly violent crimes will take place, areas can certainly become hot spots for danger for those who live in or frequent them.
The greater Unionville neighborhood — and its immediate peripheries in the geographic heart of Macon — have become something of a ground zero for local homicides.
A Telegraph examination of slayings there reveals a troubling trend.
Using the intersection of Columbus Road and Mercer University Drive as a center point — a spot just north of Henderson Stadium — and stretching a mile and a half in any direction, the 7-square-mile area there was the scene of 11 killings last year.
So far this year, in the same radius, there have been 10 killings. (Countywide this year there have been 22 slayings that investigators likely consider murders, a pace that matches last year’s toll through the end of May.)
The area of note includes the northern reaches of Pio Nono Avenue and stretches westerly from Interstate 75 to about Log Cabin Drive. It touches Napier Avenue and Mumford Road to the north and includes Montpelier Avenue and Columbus Road, Anthony Road and much of Mercer University Drive.
‘An epidemic of violence’
In recent years, as homicide totals have vaulted to record-breaking levels, no section of the city has been home to more killings.
From January 2014 until late summer 2018, 25 homicides happened within a 1.2 mile radius of the old Colonial bakery on Montpelier. The toll in the area during that four-and-a-half-year span accounted for about a fifth of Bibb County’s killings.
Perhaps most notably there this year was the May 7 discovery of the body of Amond Rashad Norwood, found dumped amid mattresses in an illegal trash site along Churchill Street. Norwood’s death, according to a law enforcement source, appears to have gang ties.
Speaking in April of the rash of killings across the city, Sheriff David Davis, in part, attributed the spike in violence to “an epidemic of gun violence.”
“Unfortunately,” he said, “our community seems not to be immune to it. It just boils down to personal disagreements along with lack of self control, a disregard for human life and the vicious use of a firearm (that) has brought us to this miserable reality.”
Historic hotspots
In past decades, other parts of the city have at times been beset by deadly violence.
During a four-year stretch in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in Macon’s Fort Hill neighborhood on the city’s east side, 18 people were slain within a mile radius of historic Fort Hawkins.
The area then was a hotbed of the surging crack-cocaine trade, but of late the brunt of the bloodshed has migrated to other pockets of the city, including: the Bloomfield area, which encompasses the southwestern corner of town; and the Houston Avenue corridor from just below downtown on south beyond Rocky Creek Road.
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.