‘I would like an apology,’ mother of slain Macon woman tells killer as he is sent to prison
As potential jurors waited upstairs from the courtroom Monday, accused killer Austin Sharrod Mason had a decision to make.
Prosecutors were offering him a deal: 20 years in prison in exchange for his guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter in the Nov. 7, 2019, killing of a Macon woman and the serious wounding of her 2-year-old daughter.
Mason, 24, could accept the terms or take his chances at trial. But if convicted of murder and other serious charges he could be sent away for life plus 45 years.
Dressed in all black, Mason, who stands 5-10 and looks lankier than the 150 pounds he is listed as on his jail booking sheet, decided to roll the dice, to go to trial.
Then after apparently thinking it over during the lunch-hour recess, Mason changed his mind.
The case against him, though strong, had its shortcomings for prosecutors. Some potential electronic evidence put Mason in the area of the killing of Shakema A. Dickson and the wounding of her daughter at their house on Pio Nono Circle.
Bibb County sheriff’s investigators also found a gun, an alleged murder weapon linked to Dickson’s death, hidden in an air duct at a house where Mason lived some 3 miles away.
But a key witness in the shooting, a man prosecutors say had been the Mason’s intended target, was apparently going to testify or provide a statement that said Mason was not the gunman.
Dickson was shot nine times as she and her daughter, also hit by nine bullets, returned to their house just east of Pio Nono Avenue and not far south of Newberg Avenue.
Prosecutors said Mason had sneaked into the house and was lying in wait for a man who was with the mother and daughter that day. That man was still outside when the shooting began. Prosecutors said that man returned fire with an assault rifle but that Mason got away.
Mason was arrested a couple of months later.
In Bibb Superior Court on Monday, as Judge David L. Mincey III looked on, Dickson’s mother approached the bench to offer a victim’s impact statement.
As the mother, Dikema Waller, her face blank, slowly made her way to the front of the courtroom, the shackled Mason stepped aside.
Sensing Waller’s sadness at the loss of her only daughter, the judge said, “I can’t make it better. I wish I could.”
Waller then turned to Mason. She said she wanted to look him in the eyes as she spoke her piece. As it happened, Waller said, she and her daughter were kin to Mason, cousins.
“I forgive you ... but I don’t think that you should ever, ever, ever, ever, ever see daylight again,” Waller said. “You took a life and shot my child. ... I’m angry, I’m mad, but I am a child of God and so are you. Just pick your Bible up.”
While Waller said she didn’t think the 20-year prison term was enough punishment, in the end she apparently understood the hurdles prosecutors faced and the reason for the plea offer.
“Most of all,” she told the court, referring to her slain daughter and surviving granddaughter, “I would like an apology for me and the girls.”
Several minutes later, the judge, just before sentencing Mason to the 20 years behind bars, asked Mason if he had anything to say.
“No, sir,” said Mason, who did not apologize.
This story was originally published February 13, 2023 at 4:42 PM.