‘I remember telling my mom I didn’t want to die.’ Macon gunshot victim recalls attack
A young man’s personal account of the toll that Macon’s gun violence has exacted on hundreds here in recent years emerged from the witness stand in a Bibb County courtroom the other day.
It was Halloween night 2017.
Kibwe Steed was 22.
He had taken his little girl, Dakota, trick-or-treating. She’d gone as Batgirl.
Afterward, they returned to the Houston Road apartment where Steed lived with his mother and siblings. While his daughter unwrapped candy, Steed snapped pictures of her.
About 10:30 that night, he stepped into the breezeway. He was heading out to visit a friend in Warner Robins. As he turned to lock the door, Steed says someone he knew walked up.
Back inside the apartment, his mother heard two blasts like lightning strikes.
Soon she saw Steed on the ground, bleeding in the doorway from his neck and stomach.
Then came her screams, wails.
At the hospital, doctors gave Steed had a 50-50 chance to live.
He survived.
Now, four years and three months later, he still has trouble hearing.
‘I couldn’t breathe’
In Bibb County Superior court on Wednesday when he took the witness stand to testify against his alleged assailant — a friend he’d met when they both worked at Walmart — Steed repeatedly asked lawyers to repeat their questions.
He has scars, too.
At one point, he stood and showed jurors the one on his stomach, tapping twice with a finger the spot where a .40-caliber bullet pierced his belly.
“You said you were shot in the stomach first,” prosecutor Dawn Baskin said to Steed. “Where else were you shot?”
“In my face,” he said.
“Do you know what side of your face the bullet went in?” Baskin asked.
“My left side,” Steed said, “and it came out my right.”
The 40-caliber bullet shattered his jaw.
He was asked what else he recalls about that night.
Steed said, “I remember telling my mom I didn’t want to die.”
“And I couldn’t breathe.”
He suffered from asthma at the time and had dropped his inhaler in the breezeway when he collapsed after being shot. Amid the shock that set in as he lay bleeding, he asked his mother to find it.
Blood pooled in his throat.
“I felt like my inhaler would help me breathe,” he told jurors Wednesday.
After that, he said, everything was “a blur.”
He spent nearly two months in the hospital. He went home a few days before Christmas.
Gun linked to murder earlier that day
The trial began this week for his accused assailant, that co-worker friend of Steed’s who prosecutors have suggested had a beef with Steed.
Jurors will on Thursday likely decide the fate of 28-year-old Horace Jamal Marsh, who faces upward of 20 years in prison if he is convicted of aggravated assault and gun-possession charges.
After Steed got out of the hospital and had healed enough to give a statement, he told the police that Steed was the person who shot him.
Investigators soon learned that Marsh had been stopped for speeding on Interstate 75 a few weeks after the shooting and that a police officer had found a .40-caliber handgun in Marsh’s trunk.
The gun, according to investigators, has since been linked to the Oct. 31, 2017, wounding of Steed and to the shooting death earlier that same day of Candace Towns.
Towns, a transgender women, was found slain in a driveway on Rosecrest Avenue a few blocks south of the county jail.
Marsh was arrested in 2018 and charged with aggravated assault in connection with Steed’s shooting.
He was later released from jail on bond only to be arrested again in July 2020 on a murder charge in Towns’ death, a case yet to make it to court.