‘Fight or flight mode.’ Mother, baby flee before alleged Columbus gang double-murder
Absent more juror issues, a verdict should be rendered this week in Columbus in the trial of three alleged gangsters accused of shooting two teens dead and wounding two others at Wilson Homes apartments.
The double-murder trial so far has lost three jurors, requiring three alternates to substitute to maintain a jury of 12 to decide the case. Losing one more could trigger a mistrial.
Gang prosecutors for Georgia’s attorney general are pursuing the case against three men they say are members of the Marlow Gang, associated with the more powerful US World.
US World is affiliated with national gangs such as the Crips, authorities said.
Defense attorneys allege the victims in the shooting were in the Zohannon gang, which police have said is a subset of the Gangster Disciples. Detectives said the Zohannons and US World had a gang war in 2021, a factor in the 70 homicides Columbus reported that year, a recent peak.
Prosecutors Cara Convery and T. McKenzie Gray said they hope to rest their case on Tuesday. The defendants so far are not expected to testify, and their attorneys have not given notice that they will call other witnesses, as required by court rules on sharing pretrial evidence.
Closing arguments likely will take a whole day, as each of the three defense attorneys will address the jury once, and the prosecution gets to argue twice, before the jury deliberates.
Two of the suspects are brothers, Terrance Upshaw, 31, represented by Shevon Thomas II, and Homer Upshaw, 28, represented by William Kendrick. The third suspect is Rodderick Quaterrius Glanton, 28. His attorney is Allen C. Jones.
They’re accused of firing a barrage of gunfire at a passing Dodge Dart around 10 p.m. on June 14, 2021, killing Saiveon Pugh, 18, and driver Jessie Ransom, 17, and wounding passengers Wandray Harris and Ta’Journey Lee.
Shot three times in the back, Harris was 19 years old, in 2021, and Lee, shot once in the back, was 16.
Both testified reluctantly last week, claiming they did not recall or did not know basic details of the incident, and did not see who shot them. Lee admitted he was a Zohannon; Harris denied it.
Alleged ambush
The shooting was at Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street, outside a house across the road from Wilson Homes, a complex police described as a 20-building housing area at 3400 Eighth Ave.
The suspects were in a single-family home in the 3100 block of Seventh Avenue, which prosecutors called a “trap house” where the men sold drugs.
Wilson Homes “has cameras all over it,” a police officer testified, and they recorded the Dodge pass the house five times, before it crashed into a parked car after flashes of gunfire from outside the house.
The video was not close or clear enough to recognize faces, but it showed bystanders walk to and from the wrecked car, some reaching inside, before police arrived.
The first officer to find the shot-up Dodge said a woman was standing nearby, staring at it. “They’re all dead,” she told him.
Witness flees
Among the witnesses Friday was Alyssa Dunbar, who had a child with Homer Upshaw. She said she was at the Seventh Avenue house with the suspects and her year-old baby that night.
The Dodge’s repeatedly passing by prompted Upshaw to tell her to leave, she testified, so she took her child, rushed to her car and drove away. He remained behind with a gun, she said.
“I went into fight or flight mode,” she testified. The surveillance video recorded her leaving right before the shooting, and she could hear gunfire from blocks away, she said.
She said a white car parked in front of hers belonged to Terrance Upshaw. The video showed people from the house go to that car and leave, right after the gunfire was reported at 10:02 p.m., five minutes before the first officer arrived.
That officer, Capt. Matt Blackstock, found Harris wounded in the back seat, and Pugh slumped over beside him, shot through the head. Lee had walked to a nearby apartment to wait for an ambulance, before he saw Blackstock and told the officer he had been shot.
Mortally wounded, Ransom had left the driver’s seat and collapsed in high weeds on the roadside. Blackstock could not see him in the thick brush, and his body was not found until a medic tripped over it.
At least two of the teens were wearing masks, and Pugh was found with an AR-style rifle in his lap, his hands on the gun that defense attorneys said had a 30-round magazine of .22-caliber bullets.
Lee on the witness stand said he had a 9-millimeter pistol that he left on the Dart’s front floorboard, but that weapon was not recovered.
Claiming self-defense
Though prosecutors say no shots came from the car, the defense attorneys claim their clients were the targets of a drive-by shooting, and had a right to defend themselves.
They said Ransom was involved in a drive-by two days earlier, at a home nearby in the 800 block of 30th Street, and the suspects were on alert because of that.
When the trio saw the same car repeatedly passing by, with masked occupants, they were justified in shooting to protect themselves, under Georgia law, the defense said: They did not have to wait to be shot first.
The law allows the use of deadly force to defend one’s self or others, or to prevent the commission of a “forcible felony,” Kendrick said.
Yet to take the witness stand are gang experts from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office.
To make the defendants’ gang charges stick, prosecutors must prove they are associated with a gang and committed crimes to further the interests of, or improve their standing in the gang.
The jury also is yet to hear from a medical examiner on the teens’ autopsies, and from firearms experts on the guns and bullet casings found at the scene.
A crime-scene investigator Friday said police recovered 60 bullet casings there.
Judge Gil McBride last week banned cell phones in the courtroom audience after one of the remaining jurors said Glanton’s mother pointed her phone at him.
The judge said the phones had become a repeated distraction, and anyone caught with one may be held in contempt.
This story was originally published November 6, 2023 at 6:00 AM.