‘I didn’t mean to shoot him.’ Jurors hear alleged confession in killings of Macon clerks
In the days after two convenience store clerks where gunned down a week apart in Macon in August 2018, investigators were tipped off by a confidential informant that two teenagers may have been involved in the killings.
Late on the night of Aug. 30, one of the teens was arrested. The second one, 16-year-old Arie Jimmelle Calloway, taken in by the police for questioning on two occasions that night, allegedly confessed in the wee hours of Aug. 31.
The validity of that confession will be for jurors to decide in Calloway’s trial this week in Bibb County Superior Court.
Calloway, now 19, and an apparent cousin of his, Jeremy Jerome Kendrick Jr., now 20, face multiple murder and armed robbery charges in the deaths of clerks Alpeshkumar Prajapati and Waqar Ali.
Prajapati was shot to death in a holdup that netted his killers about $800 as he opened the Gulf Food Mart at Napier Avenue and Bartlett Street the morning of August 14, 2018.
Ali was shot a week later, the night of Aug. 21, as he was closing the Market Place #5 store at the corner of Vineville and Holt avenues.
Kendrick is expected to go on trial later, but Calloway’s trial began Tuesday.
If found guilty, Calloway faces a maximum of life in prison without parole. He had been offered a plea deal which, had he accepted it, would have made him at least eligible for parole in the year 2068, sometime after his 66th birthday.
Calloway’s lawyer, C. Alan Wheeler, has suggested to jurors that Calloway’s confession, while not coerced, came as a result of him telling the cops “what they wanted to hear.”
On the stand Wednesday, Bibb sheriff’s investigators said otherwise, that Calloway, in fact, told them the truth, that he had offered details only someone who’d pulled off the robberies would know. Such as how much cash was taken and, in at least one of the shootings, the caliber of pistol used to kill one of the clerks.
Video recordings of Calloway’s incriminating statements to investigators, which appear to be the prosecution’s strongest evidence against him, were played in court Wednesday.
At one point in the recorded interrogation, Calloway was told by sheriff’s Lt. Reginald Thomas that “we got you on video” in one of the shootings. There is video footage of the Gulf Mart shooting that shows a gunman, but the footage doesn’t seem to be clear enough to positively identify the killer.
But at the time, Calloway didn’t appear to know that, and Thomas’ “we got you” line seemed to work.
“I ain’t kill him, though,” Calloway replied, going on to say that he had been armed with a “fake gun.”
But the investigators weren’t buying it.
Moments later in the interview, Calloway broke down in tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
But sorry for what? Thomas told him, “You got to come clean now.”
“I robbed him,” Calloway said of the Gulf Mart clerk, Prajapati, “but I ain’t shoot him.”
Thomas, a veteran investigator with three decades of police work under his belt, told Calloway that he needed to tell the truth, to get it off his chest, to apologize to the victims’ families.
“You got to be honest with yourself,” Thomas told the teen. “Now is your opportunity to be remorseful.”
Thomas’ gambit seemed to work.
“I didn’t mean to shoot him,” Calloway said, crying some more and speaking of his mother.
“Man, I just came for the money,” Calloway went on, adding that he and his alleged accomplice, Kendrick, got about $800 in the stickup.
“You did the right thing, telling,” Thomas told Calloway of his apparent confession.
Another cop in the interview room, Enrique Hogan, added, “You can go on living your life.”
But Calloway broke down crying, sobbing, that he had no life, not now.
Later that night, Calloway, in speaking to another investigator, would also allegedly implicate himself in the second deadly holdup, this one at the store at Vineville and Holt, one in which he said Kendrick was the triggerman.
“To be honest, I really didn’t want to do it,” Calloway told investigator Shaun Bridger, adding that he just stood back “in the cut” as Ali, the clerk, was confronted by Kendrick outside the Market Place store on Vineville the night of Aug. 21, 2018.
Calloway said someone else, an older man, had “a lick lined up,” a robbery, and that Calloway and Kendrick were dropped off near the store.
Calloway, in the recorded interview, said he saw Kendrick “draw down” on the clerk as the clerk left the store that night and tell Ali to “give me the money.”
But instead, Ali “bucked up” and didn’t do what he was ordered and was shot in the chest.
Calloway said he and Kendrick made off with about $1,800.
What had perhaps been the most sorrowful moment of all came earlier in the night, around the time the 5-foot-9 Calloway seemed to begin realizing the consequences, the stakes at hand.
As Calloway sat in the interview room with investigators Thomas and Hogan, Hogan mentioned to Calloway that Calloway had on smooth, clean-looking white shoes.
Calloway, who sat at a table in an almost defensive posture, his arms tucked in his T-shirt, possibly to keep warm against the air conditioning, acknowledged that, yes, he kept his shoes neat.
“That’s right,” Hogan told Calloway, who almost childlike had also buried his head in his shirt, “you a ladies’ man.”
The teenager, by then having apparently grasped the gravity of the situation and his possible fate, sobbed, “I was.”