Accused Macon killer claims he shot his mom’s boyfriend 5 times to defend her. Did he lie?
When Larry Antonio “Tony” Harden Sr. got off work at the Macon Marriott City Center where he was working as a hotel cook on Memorial Day night in 2018, he arrived home and was soon feuding with his live-in girlfriend.
Her cellphone’s battery had died and Harden hadn’t been able to reach her for a ride back to their house on Hillcrest Avenue.
The pair lived with the girlfriend’s two teenage children and her then-22-year-old son, Sellers “Scooter” Bell.
As the couple’s spat wore on into the wee hours of May 29 four years ago, Bell joined their shouting match. Then came six shots. Soon Harden was dead.
Bell would later claim he shot Harden to protect his mother, Annie Jones, a school nutritionist.
But in court, Jones — breathless, her voice quavering — failed to corroborate her son’s claim. She testified that Harden, her boyfriend, had not harmed her that night and that she was never in fear for her life.
At some point before the slaying, Bell — according to his version of events — retrieved a small .380-caliber handgun that he kept hidden behind a refrigerator.
Five of the six bullets he fired hit Harden. A few struck Harden’s hand and arm. Another ripped through his thigh. The fatal bullet pierced Harden’s left lung and he died, gasping, suffocating on his own blood on the hardwood floor in his living room.
Harden, 45, had first met Bell’s mother when they were in high school. They later reconnected and in the past decade or so moved in together.
Details of the night Harden died emerged this week in Bibb County Superior Court, where Bell was on trial for murder.
Testimony began Wednesday as prosecutors laid out their case against Bell.
They played for jurors a voicemail that was, by chance, recorded during a pocket-dialed call that Bell’s teenage sister unwittingly placed to her father in the moments after Harden was shot. The sister, too, had been in the house but not witnessed the shooting. In the voicemail, Bell’s distraught mother can be heard yelling at Bell, crying out.
“Call 911, somebody!” she said.
But at Bell’s behest, as prosecutors would later say, no one ever did.
“You’re wrong! You’re wrong!” Bell’s mother, Jones, can be heard screaming in the voicemail. “Guns aren’t anything to play with! ... Why in the world would you do that?”
In court, Jones said she figured that her son, upset that she and Harden were fussing, had “tried to defend me.”
But as prosecutor Dawn Baskin pointed out, the only thing Bell was protecting her from was Harden’s yelling — “just words.”
The shooting happened at 3212 Hillcrest Ave. in a neighborhood not far from the Napier Square shopping center, less than a mile west of Pio Nono Avenue and due south across Roff Avenue from Freedom Park.
At first investigators believed that Jones, Bell’s mother, may have been involved in Harden’s death. She had, after all, been the one who drove her already-dead boyfriend’s body to the hospital. She was, for a time, even charged with murder.
It was only later that Bell told investigators that she wasn’t involved. Then came his story that he had shot Harden to keep Harden from attacking her, a claim that fell apart in court.
Bell had also at first told investigators that he and his mother and siblings had returned home from a holiday cookout to find Harden shot dead in their living room.
Prosecutors, however, in explicit detail, described to the jury how Bell had tried to orchestrate a cover story. They said Bell had lashed out in a drunken fury and, unprovoked, opened fire on the unarmed Harden. Then they said Bell tossed the murder weapon and ditched his clothing in a storm drain.
Investigators believe the shooting happened about 12:45 a.m. They said that it wasn’t until about 2 a.m. that Harden, already dead, was loaded into his girlfriend’s car and driven to a hospital in downtown.
Bell, now 27, had recently been released from prison.
He was paroled in late February 2018 after serving about six years behind bars for a 2012 burglary in Macon. He had been out of prison for 93 days when he shot Harden.
Bell took the witness stand Friday and under direct examination from his attorney, Thomas J. O’Donnell, Bell spoke of the night Harden was killed. He acknowledged shooting Harden.
Bell said he heard his mom and Harden arguing. He said he heard her say, “Don’t be pushing on me.”
He claimed Harden had hurt his mother in the past.
He said that around the time of the shooting, Harden turned his ire on him and “started getting hostile with me.”
Bell said he told Harden not to “put his hands on my mama.”
Bell said Harden then “came at me” and that Bell was “very scared.”
“I don’t want to shoot you,” Bell recalled telling Harden.
Then, Bell said, Harden elbowed his mother.
“I just started shooting,” Bell said.
He explained that in the hour or so afterward he “panicked” and was “in shock” and that he wished he could now take back Harden’s death, but “I don’t regret stopping him from hurting my mother.”
During her cross-examination of Bell, prosecutor Baskin mentioned a phone call that Bell had made to his mother from jail just a couple of days ago.
Baskin said that during the call, which was recorded as inmate calls typically are, Bell tried to make sure his mother told a story in line with his.
“I need you to say he hit you,” Baskin said, paraphrasing the jail call.
Bell, trying to explain it away, replied, “She was in denial.”
Baskin mentioned the call again later in her examination after poking holes in Bell’s version of events.
“Just tell (the jury),” she said, again reciting the jailhouse call Bell had made to his mom, “that he hit you. That he elbowed you. ... I just need one juror to believe you.”
But his mother didn’t play along.
And in the end, not one juror believed him.
They deliberated for exactly an hour before returning a guilty verdict.
Friday afternoon, when it came time for sentencing, Judge Howard Z. Simms spoke to Bell. The judge told Bell that his false claims to justify the shooting and his flat-out lies had caught up with him.
“You,” the judge said, “belong on the wall of fame when it comes to obfuscation.”
Simms said Harden’s death could have been avoided.
“But you shot him down in cold blood,” the judge said. “You could have a walked out of that house. ... But you didn’t.”
As Simms sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the judge said, “I’m gonna make sure to the extent that I can that you don’t have the opportunity to get out and do it again to anybody else.”
Minutes later, after being driven to the county jail, handcuffed and shackled, Bell apparently seized one last opportunity for freedom.
Details were not immediately clear, but he somehow slipped away from a transport van as it wheeled near a gate at the Oglethorpe Street lockup.
He was hawked down minutes later a block or so away near Third and Hazel streets.
“We’re gonna make every effort we can to make sure he begins his new life as soon as he can,” Sheriff David Davis said, “behind prison bars.”