Ankle monitor worn by Macon homicide victim helped cops zero in on alleged killers
It would have been easy for whoever killed Amond Norwood to assume no one was watching after he was shot to death late one night in early May.
The cops believe Norwood was gunned down on a dead-end lane on the heels of a fight in front of a squat, concrete-block house on the south side of Macon’s Unionville community.
The house, police said, served as a neighborhood speakeasy. There were chairs spread around a dirt-patch yard shaded by a thick, lone pine. Across the way there on May Avenue, a vacant bungalow and brush-choked empty lots supplied cheap privacy. The nearest streetlights hang half a block away, and the nearest main drag, Pio Nono Avenue, lies four times that far to the east.
So the only prying eyes or ears might be those of a nosy neighbor.
Or so it may have seemed.
What Norwood’s killer or killers apparently did not realize — at least until it was too late — was that on one of his ankles Norwood wore a court-ordered device, an ankle monitor, to keep track of his movements.
In 2016, Amond Rashad Norwood, 26, was convicted of marijuana distribution and of being involved with Macon’s Mafia street gang, court documents show. He was sentenced to 10 years on probation as a first offender. But in January he allegedly ran afoul of the law, violating his probation, and was jailed, charged with having a Glock 43 pistol and marijuana.
Later, in the days prior to his death, he was granted bond and released from jail. One of the conditions: wear an ankle monitor.
A ‘physical altercation’
The night Norwood was killed — likely in the 11 o’clock hour of Thursday, May 6 — investigators have tracked Norwood to that underground bar or “bootleg house” on May Avenue.
The testimony of a Bibb County sheriff’s investigator earlier this week at a probable cause hearing for one of Norwood’s alleged killers revealed that Norwood’s ankle monitor helped the cops zero in on a truck they say belongs to the man who shot Norwood.
Norwood’s death was one of the city’s more notable and widely-reported murder cases of the year.
His body was found by someone out walking the morning of May 7. It was tossed beneath a mattress in an illegal, street-side dumping spot along Churchill Street on the northwest side of Unionville, about a mile and half from the May Avenue house.
The authorities at the time said Norwood had been shot several times, but what investigators did not divulge was that his killer or killers had tried but failed to burn his body.
Investigators believe they have sufficient evidence to implicate three men in Norwood’s death.
Margaton Achilles “Mark” Dudley, 45; Jerome Dewayne Beasley, 29; and Damian Devonta Felton Sr., 26, have been arrested and charged with murder and with concealing Norwood’s death.
At Wednesday’s hearing inside a courtroom at the county jail, sheriff’s investigator Malcolm Bryant testified about Dudley’s alleged role in the case.
Dudley, an ex-con who in his 20s served more than half a decade behind bars for an aggravated assault conviction, was himself shot and wounded nearly three years ago when someone fired bullets into a place he was living on Carroll Street.
Investigator Bryant, a lean, matter-of-fact detective who last year in a foot chase through backyards ran down a suspect in a rash of car break-ins, described Dudley as the bartender and proprietor of the bootleg house on May Avenue.
Bryant said that he learned from talking to witnesses and others that on the night of May 6 Norwood had been in a “physical altercation” in front of the house with one of the suspects, Damian Felton.
“After both parties were broken apart, it was stated that Jerome Beasley shot Norwood several times,” Bryant testified.
He said further investigation revealed that Norwood had been wearing an ankle monitor and that detectives began piecing together a timeline, plotting on a map the locations where the device had been.
Investigators checked 911 logs. At 11:17 p.m. on May 6, someone had reported gunfire in the May Avenue area. At the time of the gunshots, Bryant said, Norwood’s ankle monitor showed him to be “around” the bootleg house, where the cops now believe Norwood had been mortally wounded.
Then nearly half an hour later at 11:42, Norwood’s ankle monitor began moving.
‘A strong odor of Clorox’
Electronic “pings” from Norwood’s ankle monitor showed that traveling past a church, St. John Baptist, at the corner of Key Street and Anthony Road southeast of Henderson Stadium.
Bryant testified that investigators then examined surveillance footage from security cameras at the church, which lies a block north of Eisenhower Parkway. The church sits roughly three quarters of a mile southwest of the alleged shooting scene on May Avenue.
The footage, the investigator said, showed a pickup truck with chrome rims riding by “at the same time Norwood’s ankle monitor passed that location, indicating that Norwood was in the pickup truck. The ankle monitor then continues throughout (the) Unionville area and stops at the dead end of Edwards Avenue.”
At a dead-end on Edwards, just north of Anthony Road and maybe half a mile west of May Avenue, investigators found the spot they now believe Norwood’s body was set on fire, perhaps in hopes of making it unidentifiable. .
Bryant said that on May 14, a week after the killing, he learned that a pickup truck belonging to Beasley, who investigators believe shot Norwood, was parked and covered with a tarp in the backyard of a house at 436 Blossom Ave.
That house sits three blocks north of the shooting scene, just above Mercer University Drive and west of Pio Nono. Investigators removed the tarp and saw that the truck matched the one seen going past St. John Baptist Church soon after the shooting.
Bryant said that while the cops were at the house on Blossom, the owner of the Blossom residence showed up with Dudley, who was said to stay there sometimes.
Bryant testified that Dudley was questioned and that Dudley at first said he did not know whose truck it was. But according to Bryant, Dudley later said the truck belonged to Beasley and that Beasley had asked Dudley if he could leave the truck there on May 7.
In court on Wednesday, Bryant said “sources” informed him that the bed of the truck had been cleaned by Dudley and Beasley.
The investigator added, there was “a strong odor of Clorox coming from the bed of the truck.”
‘No blood, right?’
Sheriff’s deputies are also said to have searched the May Avenue house where they believe Norwood was shot.
Bryant testified that they found shell casings, blood, as well as a cellphone and jewelry that belonged to Norwood.
Seven blocks to the west, at the Edwards Avenue dead end, Bryant said Norwood’s ankle monitor was found “burned up” near a charred spot on the ground where blood was also discovered, “indicating that this was the location that Norwood was set on fire.”
When Dudley’s lawyer asked at the hearing what role Dudley allegedly had in the slaying, Bryant said Dudley had “assisted with loading Norwood’s body in the bed of Beasley’s pickup truck” in front of the May Avenue house.
Bryant also mentioned a video recorded by someone there that night which shows Norwood and the suspects together prior to the shooting.
“Mr. Dudley did not pull the trigger,” Bryant said, adding that when Norwood’s body was loaded onto the pickup truck it is unclear whether Norwood was dead or perhaps died later when his body was set on fire.
Bryant went on to say that investigators searched Dudley’s phone records and found text messages between Dudley and another person.
One message said to have been sent from Dudley’s phone at 1:16 a.m. on May 7 read, “No blood, right?”
“Don’t look like it,” came the reply. “Nothing major.”
Dudley then allegedly texted back: “That’s a plus.”