Macon man known as ‘Carrot Top’ charged with murder in Lizella teen’s 2017 shooting death
A Macon man known to local cops and prosecutors as “Carrot Top” from his past brushes with the law now faces felony murder charges in the 2017 shooting death of a Lizella teen.
The slain youth, Chase Allen Gillis, 16, was fatally wounded at a double-wide trailer on Briar Creek Trail near Knoxville Road in the predawn hours of July 12, 2017.
Officials have in the past said Gillis was slain during a middle-of-the-night gun swap.
The two men now accused in his death had long been suspects in the case. It was unclear what, if any, new evidence prompted prosecutors to formally charge the pair with murder earlier this summer.
The men, Logan Riley Nettles, 24 — dubbed “Carrot Top” for his bushy, red-haired resemblance to the well-known comic — and David Billingsley, 28, were indicted by a Bibb County grand jury June 15.
According to the indictment, prosecutors allege that Gillis was shot with an AR-15 rifle while Nettles and Billingsley tried to rob him of a firearm at the home of Nettles’ father in a cul-de-sac on Briar Creek.
The indictment does not mention who allegedly fired the rifle or why, however, investigators have in the past said that during the supposed gun deal or swap that Gillis cocked the gun being traded and aimed it at Nettles head, and that Billingsley then shot Gillis.
Reached by phone on Friday, Gillis’ mother, Amy Harper, said she had been aware of the June indictments of her son’s alleged killers, which came half a decade after his death.
“We’ve been patiently waiting for this day to come,” she said. “Though no outcome may bring Chase back for us, we want his truth to be told.”
Officials have seemingly been tight-lipped about the new developments in the case. They made no announcement about the new charges in the high-profile case, which only came to light in recent days after Billingsley, who had been living in Chicago, was arrested and extradited to Macon and booked into the county jail.
Nettles was already in custody in the wake of his conviction on federal gun charges earlier this year. In March, he was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to illegally possessing a firearm in a drug-distribution and gun-crime case unrelated to Gillis’ death.
Nettles had previously been convicted of participating in street-gang activity and for aggravated assault in a 2017 pistol-whipping attack on his father at their Lizella-area home days after Gillis’ death.
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
