A Macon judge warned him 8 months ago: Stay away from guns. Now he’s charged with murder
Turquell Cone was passed out, asleep and snoring on a bed at the Best Western motel on Riverside Drive in Macon, when someone there called the cops last year.
Cone was sleeping so soundly on April 25, 2021, that he was deemed, in police parlance, “unresponsive.”
A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy soon rousted Cone, who as a prosecutor would later say had “partaken of some things” and, as it happened, zonked out with a .45-caliber pistol at his side.
Cone, a three-time drug felon who had last been released from prison in the summer of 2018, told the deputy that he didn’t know whose gun it was.
It didn’t matter. The terms of his probation forbade him from being around guns.
Earlier this year, in late January, after spending months in jail, he pleaded guilty to a charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
At a hearing, Cone was sentenced to five years on probation. He also was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and do 80 hours of community service.
He was also warned about something else — explicitly.
“You are to possess no firearms, Mr. Cone,” Judge Jeffery O. Monroe said at that Jan. 25 hearing. “Let me make sure that you understand that, Mr. Cone. ... If somebody is (making) a ham sandwich and serving it to you on a revolver, you run away from it. ... Stay away from firearms.”
“Yes, sir,” Cone said.
A few weeks ago, Cone, now 37, was arrested in Macon on gun and drug charges.
On Friday, while still in jail, he was charged with murder in the shooting death of 40-year-old Lester Summers on Grier Street the night of Sept. 10.
Details of what led investigators to suspect Cone were not divulged.
Cone’s address in jail records is listed as a homeless shelter on Broadway. He has been in and out of prison three times since 2011.