‘It was outright sidewalk execution.’ Jury convicts Macon killer in 37 minutes
Try as he might on the witness stand at his murder trial Thursday, Lemegia Amez Willis could not explain away the inexplicable.
For a full 45 minutes, he testified in his own defense about his actions the night of July 1, 2019. The night he marched up to an unarmed young man who he had been arguing with outside an east Macon gas mart, raised a .40-caliber pistol and, point-blank, shot the man in the side of the neck.
No amount of Willis claiming it was self-defense — “I was afraid,” or, “My life was being threatened,” or, “He said he’d kill my baby,” none of which there was a shred of evidence of — came close to justifying the deadly force Willis unleashed.
In the end, the 10 seconds or so of footage from a Ken’s Food Mart security camera that showed Willis, pistol in hand, striding up and in 10 swift steps ending the life of 21-year-old Clintavious Mister spoke the only truth that can be known.
It was those horrifying images of Mister being knocked cold on his back, felled in an instant by a bullet, and, later, crawling into the store on his hands and knees as he bled to death, that said the most. What they said was this: Sometimes killings flat-out defy explanation.
A Bibb County Superior Court jury of six women and six men needed but 37 minutes to convict Willis of murder.
Judge Howard Z. Simms used barely four minutes more to sentence Willis to prison for the rest of his life.
“I don’t remember a video that displayed as outright, cold and callous of an execution as this video displays,” the judge said. “This wasn’t self defense. ... This was absolutely brutal, Mr. Willis. ... It was outright sidewalk execution.”
When Simms informed Willis that he was being sent to away forever, Willis exhaled in a heave and shook his head.
Minutes earlier, when asked if he had anything to say, Willis had said he had no ill will toward Mister but that at the time of the shooing he “was scared for my life, sir. I’m sorry that he died. And I’m ... I’m just sorry.”
Before the sentencing, Mister’s mother, Debbie Mister, sobbed as she addressed the court and spoke of the “senseless” murders in Macon, how people are “killing for no reason at all.”
She said that while she still pays the mortgage on her home that she can no longer live there because the place brings back too many memories of her son, a young man whose friend’s nicknamed him “No Feet” because at football practice he ran so fast his feet disappeared.
“I miss my baby so much,” Debbie Mister said.
Her son’s death, in the words of multiple witnesses, had stemmed from a beef that Willis had with him.
Willis, the witnesses testified, accused Mister of stealing $10 worth of marijuana.
Their chance meeting at the food mart at the corner of Jeffersonville and Irwinton roads the night of the killing was where everything came to a head and boiled over.
Willis, on the stand Thursday morning, said he suspected Mister of breaking into his house and stealing a gun, and, among other items, some $400 Penny Hardaway Nike sneakers.
Mister, in the confrontation with Willis at the store, shed his white T-shirt as if ready to fight. Words were exchanged at the gas pumps where Willis was gassing up his girlfriend’s car. A couple of minutes passed. Then instead of fighting with Mister or just leaving, Willis strode maybe 30 feet toward the front of the store where Mister stood shirtless in the parking lot.
“I don’t fight,” a witness had heard Willis say earlier, “I shoot.”
Willis, in the middle of the parking lot, coldly pulled the trigger. The unsuspecting younger man hit the ground, collapsing as prosecutor Sandra G. Matson put it, “like a dead piece of wood.”
During her cross examination of Mister, Matson methodically punched hole upon hole in futile Willis’ self-defense claim.
Willis, dressed in a gray sport coat, a white shirt and a bronze tie with a jail-made, paper cross dangling from his neck, said he had feared that a young man who was with Mister that night might be about to shoot him unless he acted first.
Matson asked Willis if that were true then why after the shooting had Willis, as the video showed, put his gun back in his girlfriend’s car and then, unarmed, walked in the store where Mister’s acquaintance had rushed to hide.
If Willis had been so in fear for his life, Matson asked, “Why’d you put your gun up?”
Willis said he just figured the other guy was no longer a threat, that the guy told him, “I ain’t got nothing to do with this,” that it was a matter between Willis and the now-dying Mister.
The story rung hollow. As did Willis’ claim that he just assumed Mister would take off running when he stamped toward Mister toting a pistol.
“I had never shot anybody,” Willis testified. Willis said he had fled the scene afterward because he was scared, that he was “trying to get my bearings back.”
Willis also said he didn’t turn himself in until two days later because his lawyer was out of town and that he laid low because he had heard the police say he was “armed and dangerous” and to “shoot on sight.” The cops had said nothing of the sort.
The more the soft-spoken Willis tried to make sense of it all on the witness stand, the more Matson peppered him about the sheer audacity of his story.
Then, in an exchange emblematic of the perils of testifying on your own behalf, Willis sunk himself.
Willis claimed he had tried to “evade” Mister, that he hadn’t wanted to escalate things, but that Mister threatened his family and he’d had no option but to charge over and gun Mister down.
No, Matson shot back, “That’s when you decided, ‘I’m fixing to put a bullet in his head.’”
This story was originally published August 5, 2021 at 5:29 PM.