‘Blood everywhere.’ Jury sees chilling video of Macon man shot at point-blank range
Editor’s note: This story includes graphic details about a 2019 homicide.
There is no mystery as to who shot and killed Clintavious Mister the night of July 1, 2019.
The shooting happened on Macon’s east side, off the road to Gordon in front of Ken’s Food Mart.
Two men were arguing for three-plus minutes in what an eyewitness says had been a verbal dispute over $10 worth of missing marijuana.
Then one of the men pulled a gun.
Footage from a security camera outside the store shows Lamegia Amez Willis, now 41, a close acquaintance of Mister’s, stride up, point a .40-caliber pistol at Mister’s neck and squeeze the trigger.
Willis had by chance encountered Mister, 21, at the store. The two knew each other well. They sometimes hung out together. Mister considered Willis an uncle and called him “Unc” for short.
Murder or self-defense?
In the video, after several minutes of back-and-forth between the two, Willis can be seen walking away from the gas pumps and toward Mister, who is near the store’s front door.
Willis takes maybe 11 steps as he makes a beeline for Mister.
He closes the distance between them in five seconds before shooting the unarmed Mister in the left side of his neck at point-blank range, the bullet passing through Mister’s jaw and out the other side of his face.
One of Willis’ attorneys, in her opening statement to jurors in Willis’ murder trial Wednesday in Bibb County Superior Court, conceded that Willis was the shooter.
What is left for jurors to decide is whether Mister’s slaying was murder or whether it was, as Willis’ defense team contends, a justified matter of self-defense.
“Mr. Willis was afraid,” defense attorney Katherine Lynn Dodd told the jury. “He was threatened and he was intimidated and he acted in self-defense.”
A graphic video
The video footage of Mister’s shooting is jarring. One second he is standing there, hands at his side with no weapon; the next second he is flat on his back, bleeding profusely.
A prosecutor went so far as to apologize to jurors for having to view the video, saying, “It’s graphic. ... You’re gonna shake your head in disbelief.”
Mister’s death was the county’s 11th homicide of 2019, a year that saw 26 people slain here. The surveillance footage that captured his mortal wounding offers a stark, gasp-inducing glimpse of the violence and bloodshed that typically goes unseen except by those involved.
“This,” prosecutor Sandra G. Matson said in her opening remarks, “is a senseless, violent execution-murder of a human being ... for just no reason but simple disregard for human life.”
The shooting happened near the food mart’s front door, which overlooks the Jeffersonville Road-Irwinton Road split. The incident involved a verbal altercation, but there is no sound in the video and no way to hear any threats that may have been uttered by either man.
A prosecution witness testified Wednesday that while Willis and Mister argued near the store’s gas pumps that Mister took his shirt off, a gesture perhaps for Willis to come and fight.
Willis, the witness testified, had accused the younger Mister of stealing $10 worth of weed from Willis’ home.
Another witness, a man who was standing with Mister during the argument, said he heard Willis tell Mister, “I don’t fight, I shoot.”
‘Pretty much blood everywhere’
As Mister stood in a parking space mere feet from the store’s curb, Willis can be seen leaving the gas pumps with a pistol in his right hand.
As Willis walked up, Mister turned his head slightly to the right as Willis closed to within arm’s reach, raised the gun fired once into the left side of Mister’s neck.
Jolted, Mister hunched forward for an instant and then toppled over backward, slamming back-first onto the concrete parking space.
After lying still for several seconds, Mister began writhing. After a minute he sat up and, on his hands and knees, crawled into the store leaving a trail of blood. He later died at a hospital, his lungs filled with blood.
In court on Wednesday, a sheriff’s investigator who took the stand was asked to describe the scene at the food mart when he arrived that night two years ago.
There was, the investigator said, “pretty much blood everywhere on the ground and inside the store.”
Earlier, during opening statements, Willis, dressed in a light-gray suit, dabbed tears with a tissue as details of the shooting emerged.
Dodd, one of his attorneys, told the jury that Mister’s death was not murder.
She asked jurors to watch the video of the shooting and pay particular attention to the way Mister was behaving, suggesting perhaps that Mister was egging on a fight.
“What you can see is his body language,” Dodd said, repeating that Willis “was afraid” and acted in his own defense.
Prosecutors rested their case at mid-afternoon Wednesday.
Then Willis informed the judge that he intended to testify later in the trial, which was set to resume Thursday morning.
This story was originally published August 4, 2021 at 5:18 PM.