Could Macon buy back guns to reduce violence? Mom wants action after shooting
A local parent whose son was friends with a teenager killed Saturday in Macon is worried Bibb County isn’t doing enough to stop the spread of gun violence.
Marie Domingue, a mom who used to live in Bloomfield, said one of her sons knows eight people killed by gun violence, and she understands why some young people carry a weapon for self-defense in Macon.
“You can’t blame these kids for having guns because they’re they’re fighting for their lives,” Domingue said. “They can’t even walk up the street... These kids have nowhere to go.”
Markell Bonner Jr., a 16-year-old who was friends with Domingue’s teenage son, was shot and killed Saturday night on Williams Street East, Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones said. Brothers Brandon Devonta Thomas, 21, and Quantayrias De’Monte Townsend, 27, were also killed.
Evidence was found and a suspect was identified as Rekeymia Shatayla Henley, a 21-year-old Macon woman, according to the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office. She turned herself in, the sheriff’s office announced Tuesday.
The sheriff’s office declined to comment on whether other suspects were involved and who used the guns left at the scene.
Domingue said Bonner’s “family is distraught right now.”
Would a gun buy-back program in Macon help?
Macon-Bibb County District 3 Commissioner Stanley Stewart, who oversees the county’s east side where the shooting happened, plans to propose a solution to Sheriff David Davis that Stewart thinks would help reduce gun violence.
Stewart wants to create a program that would pay people to turn in their guns without facing consequences.
“I’m not going to ask about your background. I’m not going to ask about where you got the gun from,” he said. “My goal would be to get the guns out of the hands of young people.”
Gun buyback programs have existed in cities across the United States since at least the 1960s and proponents believe they decrease shootings. But guns are still readily available and there is limited proof of their effectiveness, according to RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan global policy and safety research institute. Their effectiveness is also dependent on “whether participants and the guns turned in were at risk for such outcomes,” RAND Corporation said.
There is “little empirical evidence to suggest that (gun buybacks) reduce shootings, homicides, or suicides by any significant degree in either the short- or long-term,” according to an analysis by The Trace, a nonprofit news outlet that exclusively covers gun violence in the U.S.
Domingue said she would support this program, but wondered how many people would actually turn in their guns.
“The commissioner has got a good idea of the gun sweep,” she said. “Pay them for it, but are they really going to turn them all in?”
Davis did not immediately respond to The Telegraph’s request for comment on if or how a gun buyback initiative would work.
‘You can’t just bury your head’
Stewart said he was disappointed in a lack of discourse from Macon-Bibb County Mayor Lester Miller on the shooting that left three people dead Saturday night.
“Three people got killed,” Stewart said. “That’s nothing you just kind of sweep under the rug.”
Stewart said people have become desensitized from the frequency of shootings, and he believes Miller doesn’t talk about local violence enough.
“You’re not hearing anything from the mayor or anybody else about the crime numbers right now. I know it’s not going to come from him,” Stewart said. “You can’t just bury your head in the sand like an ostrich. You got to deal with it as it comes.”
Chris Floore, chief communications officer for the county, told The Telegraph that the mayor’s office hadn’t been given a chance to share its input following the shooting, then pointed to Miller’s violence reduction efforts.
Floore emphasized that Miller has supported several efforts to end violence, including “Macon Violence Prevention programs, grants, initiatives, personnel, equipment,” as well as “policy strategies, law enforcement strategies and community-led strategies.”
Homicides have declined each year since 2022 in Macon, and the county has spent millions on programs to reduce the homicide rate, Floore told The Telegraph in response to Stewart’s statements.
In an update given to the Macon-Bibb County Commission earlier this year, Miller and Davis said the homicide rate decreased by 2.5% from 2023 to 2024, and in the two years prior to that, it dropped by about 44%.
“While we have had a dramatic decrease in homicides the past few years (even outpacing the trend in other cities), the loss of any life is felt across our entire community,” Floore said in an email. “Friends, family, and whole neighborhoods grieve when someone they love is tragically taken from them, and for that, we should all be grieving.”
Still, Domingue wants to see more action.
“We need to figure out what is Bibb County doing,” Domingue said. “Why can’t we as a community do something to help these kids?”
This story may be updated as more information becomes available.
This story was originally published October 27, 2025 at 11:37 AM.
