Twelve people were shot at a birthday party in a Macon city park early Sunday. Every one of them was 19 or younger. All twelve are alive. Five people have now been charged, including a 15-year-old who is being prosecuted as an adult. And the party only ended up in that park because an Airbnb owner saw guns and did the responsible thing.
What happened?
Bibb County deputies were called to Carolyn Crayton Park at 12:06 a.m. Sunday for gunfire near the skatepark. A gathering for an 18-year-old girl’s birthday was underway. Another group arrived across the street.
Words were exchanged. Guns came out. Twelve people were hit.
- Four 18-year-old males.
- Five 17-year-old males.
- Two 18-year-old females.
- One 19-year-old male, who turned up at a hospital hours later with a wound from the same scene.
An 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy are in critical but stable condition. The other ten are stable. Nobody has died.
Investigators towed seven vehicles to the crime lab, four of which had been used to rush victims to the hospital and three left behind at the park, and interviewed ten witnesses.
Who has been charged?
Update, Thursday. Five people are now charged.
- David Pitts and Jaquez Bailey, arrested Monday. Twelve counts of aggravated assault each. Bailey is 20; Pitts’s age has been reported as both 20 and 24.
- Lantonio Hill, 17, arrested Tuesday. Twelve counts of aggravated assault.
- Justin Green, 19, arrested Tuesday. Twelve counts, plus a probation violation.
- Ahmad Lundy, 15, arrested Tuesday. Twelve adult counts of aggravated assault.
All are being held without bond. These are charges, not convictions.
Why is a 15-year-old being charged as an adult?
Georgia law allows and in some cases requires it. The state’s superior courts have original jurisdiction over a set of serious violent felonies committed by children 13 and older, and prosecutors have discretion to move other cases up.
What it means in practice: Lundy faces adult sentencing exposure, an adult criminal record, and the possibility of adult incarceration, for something he is alleged to have done at 15.
Note what is still missing from the list. Sheriff Davis said he intended to pursue charges against adults whose children had guns at the gathering. No adult has been charged on that theory. The youngest person facing twelve adult felony counts is 15.
Two arrests
Update, Tuesday. The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office announced Monday that it had arrested two 20-year-old men.
- David Pitts, 20, charged with 12 counts of aggravated assault as a party to a crime.
- Jaquez Bailey, 20, charged with 12 counts of aggravated assault.
Both are being held without bond at the Bibb County Law Enforcement Center. Charges are accusations, and neither man has been convicted of anything.
That was the first round.
The Airbnb
This is the detail that makes the story worse rather than better.
The party started at a rented Airbnb in Jones County. According to Sheriff David Davis, the owner realized people there had firearms and told the group to leave.
That was the correct call. A homeowner saw armed teenagers in a house he was responsible for and ended it. He did the thing we tell people to do.
And the group got in their cars and took the guns to a public park at midnight.
Where the accounts do not line up
Worth being precise, because the versions in circulation differ.
Early syndicated copy from the sheriff’s office said the two groups exchanged words, displayed firearms and shot at each other. At a later news conference, Davis described it differently: another group arrived and opened fire, and people in the original group fired back. 41NBC reported investigators have found no evidence the birthday group fired at all.
Those are three meaningfully different stories about who is a victim and who is a defendant. Davis also said he believes shell casings at the scene point to both semi-automatic and fully automatic fire, which in practice usually means a converted handgun. That is his read of the scene, not a lab finding, and it has not been confirmed.
Who these kids are
Davis said the young people at the gathering came from Central High School, Northeast High School, and Bibb County’s VIP and SOAR academies. This was not a stranger crowd. It was a Saturday night in one school district.
The sheriff signaled where he intends to go next.
When we find out who did this, and we’re gonna find out who did it, I’ll guarantee you there’s some adult loved ones or some guardians and knew they had guns.
Bibb County Sheriff David Davis
The emergency room went on lockdown
Victims arrived in private cars rather than ambulances, with large numbers of family and friends following them in. Hospital staff locked down the emergency room.
That is a detail people skip past. A hospital treating twelve gunshot patients also had to secure itself against what might walk through the door behind them.
The BeezLoop Take
Twelve teenagers shot and nobody dead is not a happy ending. It is a coin landing on its edge, and we should say so before anyone files this under near-miss.
The Airbnb is the part worth sitting with. One adult in this story did exactly what he was supposed to do, and the entire effect of it was to relocate the danger from a house where he could see it to a park where nobody could. That is not an argument against what he did. It is an argument that individual responsibility has a ceiling, and that the ceiling is low when the underlying problem is how many armed 17-year-olds are circulating on a Saturday night. Tell every homeowner in Middle Georgia to do what he did and you get the same midnight, in a different park.
Davis pointing at parents and guardians is the most honest thing any official said about this, and it is also the part that will go nowhere. Prosecuting adults for a minor’s access to a gun is legally hard, politically radioactive in Georgia, and almost never attempted at scale. We would like to be wrong. Watch whether a single adult is actually charged, because that is the difference between a sheriff saying something true at a podium and a jurisdiction meaning it.
The automatic-fire claim deserves scrutiny in both directions. If casings really do show converted handguns, that is a federal machine gun case and it should be treated as one, because switches are the single change that turned teenage arguments into twelve-casualty events. If the casings do not show that, the sheriff said it anyway at a press conference, and a county walked away believing something unproven about its own kids. Either way, somebody should have to say which.
And we would resist the usual framing that this is a story about Macon. Ten days ago it was eight shot at a Florida memorial for a teenager who had been killed. Seven hours after the shooting in Macon, it was three men killed at an after-hours club running inside a Detroit house. What these share is not a city. It is the same twenty seconds happening in different places: an argument, and enough guns present that the argument gets settled permanently.
Will Bibb County actually charge one, or was that a press conference sentence?
If the one adult who acted correctly in this story only succeeded in moving the guns somewhere less supervised, what exactly are we asking adults to do? And will Bibb County actually charge one, or was that a press conference sentence?
Related: a seven-month-old shot asleep in his mother’s bed in Spartanburg, and a Memphis woman given 30 years for killing a co-worker over a drive-thru order.
Sources: 41NBC / WMGT · WGXA · FOX 5 Atlanta · 13WMAZ
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