Macon man who spent over six years in jail on murder charge acquitted
A man who spent a little over six years in the Bibb County Jail awaiting trial was found not guilty of his charges, court records show.
Jeffery Hunter Jr. was accused in the killing of Danny Causey and wounding Terry Warren behind Raffield Tire Master in the early morning of Dec. 16, 2018. Kaylen Devon Johnson and Jedarrius Meadows were also charged in the case.
On June 17, a jury found Hunter not guilty of the charges after they heard evidence for roughly six days, according to Hunter’s attorneys, Travis Griffin and MacKenzie P. Miller.
Though their first indictment was from 2019, which accused the three men of being part of a gang and violating Georgia’s Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, they were re-indicted in 2023 to exclude that charge and Meadows’ name after he pleaded guilty in 2022 to one count of aggravated assault.
Hunter and Johnson were charged with one count of malice murder, two counts of felony murder and one count of aggravated assault. Johnson was additionally charged with three counts of aggravated assault after he allegedly shot at three passengers after they rear-ended Meadows’ car that night.
The night of the incident
The case stems from the allegation that on the night of the shooting, two young Black men in their 20s — one dark-skinned and the other light-skinned with a tattoo under his eye — were identified by Warren to be the shooters, according to court documents. More specifically, after being shown a lineup of Facebook pictures, Warren identified Hunter as the dark-skinned man and Johnson as the light-skinned man with the tattoo who shot at him that night.
However, before the shooting, Meadows was around the area with Johnson and others and was heading to Primetime 41, according to court records. Around 1 a.m., Meadows’ former girlfriend, who had been hanging out with Meadows and Johnson, received a phone call from the two men, claiming that there had been a shooting at another nightclub around the area and that they needed to leave.
“The club was not very far from Raffield Tire,” court documents show.
The group with Meadows’ girlfriend left Primetime 41 shortly after 2 a.m. and reunited with Meadows and Johnson, according to court records.
Before leaving, Meadows backed up in his black Honda and into a burgundy Grand Marquis, then drove away. As the driver of the Grand Marquis followed Meadows, he brake-checked the car and caused the other car to rear-end Meadows’ Honda, court records show.
Johnson then pulled “himself out of the passenger window and, while turning the upper half of his body toward to Grand Marquis, (began) shooting at the vehicle with a 9mm handgun,” according to the court document. Three passengers were in the vehicle, according to court documents.
Though unrelated to the shooting at Raffield Tire, court documents suggest that the shooting that followed the crash was necessary to tie the story together.
Witness ‘mistakenly identified’ suspect
When witnesses were interviewed about the incident between the Honda and the Grand Marquis, and provided a picture of a light-skinned man with a tattoo under his eye, they identified the man in the picture as Johnson, the same one who had shot toward the passengers inside the Grand Marquis. In that same interview, the witnesses denied knowing Hunter.
Further, attorneys Griffin and Miller argued that “Warren mistakenly identified the shooter as Jeffery Hunter when it was actually Jedarrius Meadows,” court records show.
Hunter was not near Raffield Tire Master, but “he was in the Bloomfield area of Macon, a friend’s family member’s home on Churchill Street and then at a nightclub in downtown Macon,” according to court documents. Further, when he was interviewed by law enforcement, Hunter said he wasn’t with Johnson or Meadows that night, court records show.
Hunter was arrested on Dec. 28, 2018, and has remained in the Bibb County Jail since then, according to court records. He was denied pre-trial release in 2019, denied bond in 2023 and again on March 15.
But his exoneration on June 17, he was released that same evening.
What of the other defendants?
Johnson’s trial was held at the same time as Hunter’s and he was also found not guilty of the murder charges. But a jury still found him guilty on three counts of aggravated assault, stemming from the altercation during the crash, and sentenced him to serve 25 years in prison, followed by 35 years of probation, according to court records from Monday.
As for Meadows, he had pleaded guilty to his aggravated assault charges on Nov. 9, 2022, and was excluded from the new indictment, which solely charged Hunter and Johnson with Causey’s murder. However, Meadows was one of the victims of the fatal shooting at Midtown Daiquiri Bar and Grill on May 18.
Griffin had called in Meadows to testify on Hunter’s behalf, but he died days later. Further, Griffin said that Johnson had planned to confess to the shooting as self-defense.
“I don’t know exactly how those dominoes would have fallen if he would have actually made it to trial and made it on the stand,” Griffin said. “That would have been an interesting series of events, but it did not come to pass.”
