A Macon boy was given a ‘second chance’ in May. Now the 17-year-old is dead.
A 17-year-old Macon boy who in early May pleaded guilty to his role in a pair of 2019 carjackings — crimes that happened days before his 15th birthday — was shot and killed Friday night.
The victim, Ty’Reek D. Young, had been sentenced to time served and was released from the Bibb County jail in the wake of his May 2 guilty plea.
Prosecutors called Young’s sentence in the carjacking case “a break.”
But on Friday, sheriff’s officials said, Young was shot in the head shortly before 9:30 p.m. He was found lying along Carlisle Avenue in a neighborhood a few blocks east of the well-traveled intersection at Log Cabin Drive and Napier Avenue. He died Sunday afternoon at a downtown hospital.
Investigators have yet to divulge information about a motive or reveal further circumstances surrounding Young’s shooting.
Defense attorney John Carter, who represented Young in the carjacking cases, told the Telegraph he received word of Young’s death over the weekend.
“It’s awful,” Carter said Tuesday. “He’s given a great second chance and less than three months later he’s laying dead on the street, shot.”
Macon carjacking case
Young had been 14 years old and in the eighth grade in mid-December 2019 when he and four other people were implicated in a pair of carjackings — stealing cars at gunpoint and attempted armed robbery.
Prosecutors also noted that Young had not participated in both alleged heists, declaring him “probably one of the least” culpable suspects.
At a hearing in Bibb Superior Court on May 2 this year, Young pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of hijacking a motor vehicle in the second degree and to a pair of lesser robbery charges. He was sentenced to two years behind bars, which he had already served.
As part of his sentence, Young was also ordered to, if called upon by the state, testify against other suspects in the cases.
“Our hope,” Bibb prosecutor Dawn Baskin said at the hearing in May, “is that through this process he has learned that when you lay down with dogs you wake up with fleas, and you end up spending two years of your very young life in jail.”
During the hearing, Young mentioned that he hoped to find work with his grandfather, who worked in the pulpwood business. As The Telegraph reported at the time, Judge Howard Z. Simms told Young that it was “honest work.”
Then the judge pressed Young on what it was that had led Young astray.
“Is it a rite of passage?” the judge asked. “Is it something you feel like you’ve got to do? ... Is it just for the thrill? What is the deal?”
“I don’t know,” Young replied.
The judge asked again, “What was it?”
“I really don’t know,” Young finally answered. “Just young and dumb.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2022 at 3:02 PM.