What Columbus police, politicians are doing as gangs and guns fuel high homicide rate
When Columbus gym owner Terrence Flowers quit buying snacks at nearby convenience stores, it wasn’t for a diet.
“What made me stop going to some of the stores off Buena Vista Road is seeing young people walking into stores with firearms, without rhyme or reason, not really caring, actually bragging sometimes that they had it on them, and they weren’t worried about nothing.”
He decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
“Seeing how they maneuver and how they act with these weapons, I think ... they might be saying, ‘Hey, if you mess with me, we’ll do something to you.’ When you’re going to purchase these store items, it’s not even worth you guessing which type of individual I’m going up against.”
So he will lay off the snacks, or buy them elsewhere, he said: “Going to the store to get some zooms-zooms and wam-wams ain’t worth my life.”
If “zooms-zooms” and “wams-wams” sound like prison names for snack foods, that’s because they are: Flowers has been there. He’s changed his life since, and at age 49 has a newborn, a 13 year old and adult children. He knows how easy it is to get in trouble, when you’re young.
He feels like he hears trouble all the time now, he said: gunshots first, sirens next.
“I would say this is a hotbed of violence,” he said of the Buena Vista Road corridor. “I hear gunshots almost every day. I see the police and ambulances coming up Buena Vista Road all times of the day, from morning to night.”
Now he buys his snacks elsewhere: “It kind of made me start going to, you know, the Walmart neighborhood store instead of going to some of the convenience stores where these kids carry guns like it’s legal. And just by looking at them, I know some of them are underage.”
In Georgia, it’s illegal for someone younger than 18 to carry a handgun.
Gangs and guns
Both the county sheriff and coroner said young men involved in gang battles were a driving force behind 70 homicides reported here in 2021, a recent peak. Other investigators also have said a series of gang retaliations boosted the numbers.
The gangs involved were reported to be the Zohannons and US World, the latter formerly known as the 4MG gang, and their feud eventually played out.
“That was the year that we basically got one about every week,” said Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan, who has watched his homicide caseload grow since he took office in 2013. “The majority are gang related. There are a few domestics.”
Domestic or family violence over the years has accounted for around 12% of Columbus’ homicides, according to a 2021 Ledger-Enquirer analysis. But a single incident, as when one parent kills the other and their children, can boost the percentage in a year’s tally.
Sheriff Greg Countryman agreed with the coroner.
“If you look at the homicides for 2021, the majority were gang related,” he said. “It was black males retaliating against other black males.”
The sheriff has a gang task force and a database of gang members collected at the county jail, which the sheriff runs. That database is a resource for other agencies.
He said Columbus has an estimated 1,800 gang members, about 40 major gangs and over 100 “hybrid” gangs, which can be a mix of major gang subsets or a gang alliance.
The Georgia Department of Corrections annually releases 6,000 gang members from its prisons, he said.
Once gangs begin to feud, a cycle of retaliation follows, sometimes signaled by “beefing” or threatening each other on social media, he said.
“They will tell you what they’re getting ready to do,” Countryman said. “These guys are about scoring points, and they’ll go back and forth, back and forth.”
The shooting that ensues also conveys a message, he said: “Violence is a language, and you have to be able to interpret that.”
Kids in conflict
Beyond the gang retaliations are personal disputes, likely to lead to gunfire when everyone’s armed. Columbus’ pending murder cases have had suspects as young as 14.
“The upshot is that it’s just not being able to handle conflict,” said Mayor Skip Henderson, who’s also the city’s public safety director. “When they end up with a situation where somebody’s dating somebody else’s girlfriend, or they just disrespect one another, these kids for whatever reason think the only response is to shoot a gun.”
Flowers, who grew up in Columbus, can recall when a handgun was uncommon, among teens.
“Now if you don’t have a gun, you are the minority,” he said. “These kids have far too much access to guns.”
The coroner believes his homicide victims are trending younger. The average age last year was 28, with multiple teenagers killed. Also trending is the number of rounds fired, he said, some from high-volume magazines.
“We’re seeing 50 or 60 shell casings on the road, and bodies being hit multiple times, where it used to be single shots,” he said.
Absent emergency medical care, the toll would double, he said: “If as many people died as got shot, we’d be in the hundreds, because every day I listen to the scanner, the radio, and there are gunshots, gunshots, gunshots.”
That’s how Flowers felt about Buena Vista Road. “A lot of times, if I’m outside doing a fitness program, I hear gunshots. I get my people back in, and next thing I know, I’ll look at the window, and I’ll see emergency services or law enforcement going down the street.”
Both he and Bryan said the shooting now seems less targeted: “Now it’s just crazy stuff, a lot of drive-bys,” the coroner said. “And I don’t know if they’re picking their targets or just out having fun and driving by and shooting.”
Said the sheriff: “We have parts of Columbus where we have young men walking around with AK-47s, taking over neighborhoods.”
He declined to specify those neighborhoods: “I would rather not do that, being we have surveillance in those areas right now.”
Like Flowers, he said he would be wary of armed teenagers: “They will take your life just for saying something to them.”
Columbus Deputy Police Chief Roderick Graham said the police department doesn’t believe gun violence is concentrated in any one area, or confined to a single age group or to gang operations.
“We believe gun violence is all throughout Columbus, Georgia,” he said. “It can be in any part of the city.”
Car burglaries arm a lot of young criminals: People who don’t want to carry their guns inside every night leave them in the vehicle, sometimes forgetting to lock it.
“If that gun is in the vehicle, they’re going to get it,” Countryman said of car break-ins.
Graham said legal gun owners leaving weapons unsecured continues to be an issue here.
“We highly encourage individuals to not leave their firearms in their vehicles,” he said. “Definitely secure your weapons inside of your residence or on your person.”
Fighting back
Columbus’ homicide count for 2022 showed a significant drop, to 45. It was welcome news in a time of rising gun violence nationwide. Macon, Georgia, had 70 homicides last year.
The subsiding gang war was part of that, the coroner said: “It sort of bellied out a little bit.”
Sources cited several other factors they said made a difference.
The sheriff touted a collaboration of local agencies targeting gangs and felons with guns, particularly fugitives from justice. His gang task force regularly coordinates with other agencies, including the FBI, DEA, U.S, Marshals and Fort Benning’s Criminal Investigation Unit.
Like the sheriff, Deputy Chief Graham cited the “collaborative effort” of multi-agency crime suppression operations, and the department’s “Enough Is Enough” campaign in 2021 that cleared more than 100 warrants, resulting in murder arrests and drug seizures.
The police also targeted felons with firearms, he said: “That was our focus as well, but in addition to that, it was traffic violations, included in street crime suppression, and any other street crime that was being committed that was a jailable offense.”
Traffic enforcement often leads to arrests for other offenses related to drugs and guns, he said.
The sheriff noted also that more prosecutions are shifting to state and federal authorities, to free the local district attorney to focus on murder cases and other violent crimes. The Georgia Attorney General has a gang unit that is helping with Columbus’ multi-defendant gang cases, and federal prosecutors are taking on convicted gangsters caught with firearms.
Henderson said the city’s investing in youth crime-prevention programs also helped reduce the violence:
“One of the things we continue to do is pump money into programs that provide mentorships and other resources for these young people,” he said.
“So we spend about $750,000 to $800,000 a year through grants that go into the community.”
Columbus this past January had three homicides. The toll for the first month of the five previous years was: Four in 2018; two in 2019; seven in 2020; six in 2021; and one in 2022.
Aside from the the 45 homicides last year and the 70 counted in 2021, before the coroner added two more based on later autopsy results, here are the totals for other recent years:
- 46 in 2020.
- 41 in 2019.
- 34 in 2018.
- 44 in 2017.
Columbus, where the 2020 Census population was 206,922, has averaged 47 homicides over the past five years.
The homicides for Muscogee County are tallied differently than the cases Columbus police count as “murders.”
A homicide means one person killed another, regardless of the legal ramifications, and that is the “manner of death” listed on a death certificate. “Murder” means police felt murder charges were warranted, excluding killings they decided were justified.
Recent police murder counts, for example, were:
- 38 in 2019.
- 42 in 2020.
- 64 in 2021.
- 36 in 2022.
The coroner said you never know how a year will go, when it’s just beginning.
“I don’t think we’re going to be up in the 70s like we were two years ago,” he said of the annual homicide tally. “We’re going to be hanging around the 40 number, I would think.”
Like Bryan, Countryman said January doesn’t predict the death toll to come: “You can’t gauge that.”
He said he intends to increase gang investigations, in the coming year, asking Columbus Council for 10 more officers devoted to that. His office has 300 investigations open now, and most are gang-related, he said.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we have to have the tools and the resources to continue,” he said.
This story was originally published February 6, 2023 at 5:00 AM.