Biker vest that started gang shootout at Macon Road bar is still missing

Columbus police never found the biker vest that started it all.

It was the vest the man who then headed the Strikers Motorcycle Club was wearing on Oct. 9, 2015, during a club meet-and-greet invaded by the Outcast biker gang. It was the signature club vest three Outcasts pulled off him during a brawl inside the 4th Quarter Sports Bar on Macon Road, where Dominic Mitchell fatally was shot twice in the chest.

As more gunfire erupted and people scattered, surveillance video recorded the fleeing Outcasts running away with Hilliard London’s Striker vest, a trophy of battle later to display as a spoil of war.

Investigators afterward would find significant evidence while pursuing a murder case against three alleged Outcasts now on trial in Muscogee Superior Court, but not that vest. They don’t know what happened to it.

What happened?

In court Friday, London took the witness stand to recount what happened around 11:20 p.m. that day at the 6959 Macon Road bar.

He said he was sitting in a patio area having a drink and smoking a cigar when he saw a line of bikers pull up outside, so he walked to the front door to meet them, to see if they wanted to talk. They walked past him, entered the bar and spread out as he came in behind them and stopped at the door.

“They was all over,” he said, estimating their number as eight to 10. Surveillance video showed eight motorcycles arriving outside, traveling in single-file, followed by a sport-utility vehicle and a sedan.

London said one of the newcomers walked up to him and asked, “Who you with?”

“I had my vest on,” he said. “I said, ‘Man, you see who I’m with.’ ”

The stranger swung at him, grazing his jaw. He hit back, knocking the man to the floor. As the assailant on the floor grabbed his legs, two more jumped him, pulling at his vest, which he wiggled off to keep fighting.

“I wasn’t worried about my vest at the time,” he testified. “I was fighting for my life.”

He heard two gunshots, and then everyone started running, he said. He saw Mitchell down on the floor, walked over and saw Mitchell had been shot.

He rushed outside, where a friend named Ed Bush had grabbed an AR-15 rifle he aimed at the fleeing Outcasts. “He could have shot all of them,” London said.

Instead Bush fired into the air, and then the Outcasts started shooting back, he said: “After that, all I remember is bullets coming from everywhere.”

Police said more than 70 shots were fired outside the club, hitting people, cars and walls.

The video

External security cameras at the bar recorded the Outcasts arrival and their running away. Detective David Stokes testified that police reviewing the footage noted the bikers split up, with some approaching from the rear of the bar to slip in a side door. At least one of three men who came from the back of the bar held a gun at his side.

Stokes compared their approach to a paramilitary group employing police or Army tactics to secure a target.

In an earlier pretrial hearing, the detective testified the bikers’ conduct showed their actions were deliberate and directed. “It was not an accident,” he said. “This was an intentional assault, for lack of a better word.”

Assistant District Attorney Ray Daniel gave a similar assessment in his opening statement to the jury: “They walk together, just like a commando group,” he said of the Outcasts.

One eyewitness identified each of the three defendants as having been at the bar, but London said he could not. He recalled only that one was an older man with a gray and black beard and dreadlocks, and another was short: “That was the thing that caught my eye.”

Daginald Wheeler, whom authorities say is an Outcast leader known as “Headquarters,” has a graying beard and dreadlocks.

London, who said he joined the Strikers in Atlanta around 2013, testified he tried before the event to let other area clubs know about it, an unofficial protocol among biker gangs. He contacted the Wheels of Soul and twice spoke on the telephone with someone affiliated with the Outcasts, he said.

He said the Strikers promoted their gathering on social media, inviting other members from out of town and anyone else who was interested.

Daniel told jurors in his opening statement that the Outcasts were trying to teach the Strikers a lesson by taking London’s vest, the equivalent of stealing a rival group’s gang colors.

The victim

The man killed in the shootout wasn’t with the Strikers, London said. Mitchell, a native of Louisiana, had been invited to cook for the club, he said: “He was going to do some Cajun stuff for us.”

London recalled walking back inside after the shooting stopped, and seeing friends gathered around Mitchell. “They was trying to revive him,” he said.

Mitchell bled to death there on the floor, authorities said.

The two suspects on trial with Wheeler are Demark Ponder and James Daniels Jr., who police said were “probates,” or pledges, to the Outcasts.

Ponder earlier sought immunity from prosecution, claiming self-defense. In a pretrial hearing he testified that someone aimed a gun at him inside the bar, so he fired twice as he ducked away and ran.

One of three people wounded in the ensuing shootout, Ponder also admitted he lied to police about being shot, telling officers he was hit in a random shooting on Interstate 185.

Police questioned Ponder and Daniels after the pair went to the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital, both dressed all in black and riding Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Ponder in his pretrial hearing said black was standard Outcast attire: “We wore all black, sir. … That’s part of our dress code.”

This story was originally published May 5, 2017 at 4:15 PM with the headline "Biker vest that started gang shootout at Macon Road bar is still missing."