Amid December violence, Macon’s homicide toll surges far beyond last year’s record high

On the morning of Nov. 14 at a house in a south Macon neighborhood not far from where Pio Nono and Newberg avenues intersect, a 49-year-old woman named Claudette June Brown was shot and mortally wounded.

Her death was the city’s 61st homicide of 2022.

For the next 19 days, the troubling toll — a modern-day high that far eclipses last year’s record-high of 54 slayings — held at 61. Save for a 20-day span in October, that 19-day stretch was the second-longest here this year without a slaying.

Then came early December and a week that saw six people shot dead, three of them in one incident.

Earlier this week, a seventh victim, Craig Page, 48, died of a gunshot wound he suffered on Oct. 3, raising the year’s homicide toll to 68 in total of 62 incidents.

All but three of 2022’s homicide victims were shot to death. Brittany White, 27, died in a stabbing; Cynthia L. Berry, 49, died of strangulation; and a third, Carlos Delmara Shelley, 40, was an inmate strangled in the Bibb County jail.

“The homicides are overshadowing the good things, positive things, going on in our community,” Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones said Tuesday. “It’s a black eye.”

In the December killings, arrests have been made in two cases: the Saturday night shooting of Demonta Steve Clyde, 29, on Gordon Street and the Dec. 3 death of 22-year-old Tylik Emmanuel Young on Third Avenue.

“This is about anger and conflict,” Jones said. “Nobody wants to walk away.”

Investigators have not publicly identified a suspect or suspects in a Dec. 6 shooting that left three teenagers dead and a fourth wounded. Sources familiar with the case have said the deaths of Marcelles Williams, 16; Deshond Jah’Ryon Willis, 18; and Tishoun Williams, 18, which happened at the West Club Apartments between Mercer University Drive and Columbus Road, may have been the result of a robbery.

In Macon and nationally, violent deaths have spiked in recent years. The murder rate nationally went up 30% from 2019 to 2020, “the largest single-year increase in more than a century,” according to the Pew Research Center.

The homicide totals in Macon for the past three years — 51 in 2020, 54 in 2021 and 68 so far in 2022 — each eclipse the former record high of 43 deaths in 1992.

According to Telegraph records, in the past 12 years here 387 people have been slain; 270 of them in the past six years.

By comparison, Columbus in west Georgia, which has roughly 50,000 more people, recorded 70 homicides last year. So far this year, the Muscogee County municipality has had 41 slayings.

“The entire leadership of Macon-Bibb ... we are all concerned about the homicides,” Jones said. “It’s not gonna be a quick fix.”