Surveillance video, confidential tip lead to arrest in Macon pedestrian’s hit-and-run death
For nearly three months, Bibb County sheriff’s investigators hunting a mystery driver in a deadly hit-and-run knew they were looking for a black truck with mag wheels. The pickup had a raised body with red lettering on its side.
Images of the truck — likely grainy glimpses of it, at least — were collected from security cameras near where a pedestrian was struck and left for dead along Mercer University Drive the night of May 9.
The victim, Larry G. Simmons, had lived a few blocks away from where he was hit at the intersection of Burton Avenue, not far from Henderson Stadium. Simmons, 65, was a Taylor County native and, according to his obituary, he liked the outdoors, fishing and “tinkering with his Dodge truck.”
But it was another truck, a black one with mags, that would capture the attention of investigators. Finding it did not come easy.
Information gleaned from an arrest warrant issued in the case last week provides some details of what culminated in an arrest on Tuesday.
According to the warrant, a break in the probe appears to have come in the form of a tip from “a confidential caller.”
It wasn’t clear when the information was offered, but the telephone tipster told investigators that the truck they were looking for could be found at a house on Bailey Avenue, just off Napier Avenue, about a mile northeast of where Simmons was run over.
Sheriff’s deputy Shannon L. Moseley went to the house on Bailey and, in the driveway, saw a Ford pickup that looked like the truck in the video footage from the hit-and-run.
Moseley noted in the warrant that the Ford had “recent damage” to its front end that was “consistent with a pedestrian strike.”
The warrant further stated that Moseley spoke to a man at the house named Marquis A. Meaux and asked him how the truck had been damaged.
Meaux, 33, told Moseley that “he did not remember,” the warrant said.
Moseley further noted in the arrest document that a few days later he spoke to Meaux again and that Meaux “told me that he leaves the keys in the truck for people in the neighborhood to use.”
Further details were not divulged, but Meaux was arrested and jailed Tuesday.
He was being held without bond on charges that included first-degree homicide by vehicle.