Gunman who killed Macon woman driving on U.S. 80 may have mistaken her for her son, police say
A Macon woman believed to have been shot and fatally wounded by a gunman in another car as she drove home on Eisenhower Parkway in western Bibb County one night last fall may have been a victim of mistaken identity.
At a probable cause hearing this week, a Bibb sheriff’s investigator testified that 59-year-old Harriett Patrick was driving her 2013 Lexus sedan toward her house west of Interstate 475 in the Lizella area at about 1 a.m. on Oct. 10.
A bullet pierced her driver’s-side door and struck the left side of Patrick’s abdomen as she neared the Fulton Mill intersection on Eisenhower. Even so, she continued on in her bullet-riddled car some 2 miles further, and almost made it home before stopping to wait for help, an incident report said. She died 10 days later.
Her slaying would remain a mystery for weeks.
But according to investigators, Harriett Patrick’s car — or at least a sighting of it the night she died — may have had a fateful role in her death.
Her silver Lexus was one that her son, Zachery Patrick, sometimes drove, investigator Robbie Parks said at Wednesday’s hearing in Bibb Magistrate Court.
Parks testified that crucial information eventually emerged in the wake of the shooting. He said Zachery Patrick spoke to him and mentioned “previous altercations” he’d had with a man named Quteavis “Q” Simmons.
Simmons was once romantically involved with a woman Zachery Patrick had been seeing, Parks said.
According to Zachery Patrick, Parks said, at some point prior to the shooting Simmons had shown up at the woman’s apartment while Zachery Patrick was there. Parks said Simmons “attempted to fight” Zachery Patrick, who had driven to the woman’s house in his mother’s Lexus.
Parks said in court that Zachery Patrick also told investigators that after the shooting the woman he had been seeing sent him text messages in which “she apologized” the shooting had happened and told him it was Simmons “who did the shooting.”
Simmons, 30, of Gordon, was jailed Feb. 9 on a murder charge in Harriett Patrick’s death.
Parks’ testimony this week suggested that Simmons apparently saw the silver Lexus in the wee hours of Oct. 10, and — possibly unaware that Harriett Patrick and not her son was at the wheel — followed it westerly across Macon.
Before arresting Simmons earlier this year, investigators examined his cellphone records.
Parks testified that phone-location data showed Simmons’ phone and Harriett Patrick’s phone “pinging side-by-side from Pio Nono Avenue, all the way down Eisenhower, all the way out Eisenhower to Fulton Mill Road where the shooting occurred.”
“And then,” Parks added, “you can see the two phones separate.”
Parks said when Simmons was questioned in February he claimed that on the night of the shooting he was at his grandmother’s house in Wilkinson County, a dozen or so miles east of Macon.
When Simmons’ attorney, Melvin Raines II, asked Parks at the hearing this week whether Simmons’ supposed alibi had been checked out, the investigator said Simmons’ family was “not cooperative.”
Parks said “other evidence” also linked Simmons to the slaying.
An incident report describing the immediate aftermath of Harriett Patrick’s shooting said she spoke to the first sheriff’s deputy on the scene in her neighborhood along Clayts Circle, just south of Central State Prison.
The report said she was wounded and that her car had bullet holes in its driver’s door, a passenger-side door and another bullet hole on its left-rear quarter panel.
Harriett Patrick told the deputy she was traveling west on Eisenhower near Fulton Mill when “a gray vehicle pulled up beside her and (someone) began shooting,” the report said.
It was unclear whether the automobile involved has turned up.
Parks said no bullet shell casings were found along the road where the shooting was thought to have happened.