Jury to start deliberating 2013 homicide case today

Jurors Tuesday will start deliberating the fate of Reginald Jackson after attorneys in his murder trial concluded their closing arguments Monday evening.

Judge Arthur Smith III sent the jury home at 5 p.m. and asked them to return Tuesday morning at 9, when he will instruct them on the law before they retire to discuss the verdict.

Jackson is accused of fatally shooting 23-year-old Dior Cheney and wounding Travis Porter on Oct. 29, 2013, at the intersection of Benning Drive and Head Street, where Cheney was driving his Ford Focus with Porter in the passenger’s seat.

Porter, the apparent target of the assault, was shot three times before he climbed out of the car and ran. Cheney, shot in the head, then sped across the T-shaped intersection and rammed a utility pole on the far side of Benning Drive. He was found dead in the car.

Attorneys focused most of their closing arguments on Porter, who told police in 2013 that Jackson was the gunman, picking the suspect’s picture from a photo lineup. But on the witness stand Thursday, Porter testified that he lied, and told the court Jackson was not the shooter.

Defense attorney Melvin Cooper told jurors the prosecution could not expect them to believe Porter in one instance and not in another, noting that Porter in court was under oath, but not when he talked to police three years ago.

“There is no direct evidence that Reginald Jackson committed this crime,” Cooper said.

The shooting happened about 8 p.m. when it was dark outside, and it happened fast, Cooper said. The gunman was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, so Porter’s being able to recognize the assailant’s face was unlikely, he said.

Though Jackson had no clear motive to shoot Cheney or Porter, other people in the neighborhood did, the attorney said: “Mr. Porter, Travis Porter, had a lot of enemies out there.”

Porter and Cheney that day had been to a “trap house” on Winston Road, the street Porter grew up on. A trap house is a place rented for dealing drugs.

Senior Assistant District Attorney Don Kelly in his closing argument recounted events leading up to the shooting: Porter, who had moved from Columbus to Macon where Cheney was his neighbor, had come home to try to buy a pound of marijuana.

Porter asked an acquaintance to locate a dealer, and the intermediary summoned Corey Purdue, whom Porter on the witness stand admitted having beaten and robbed during a dice game in 2012. The two recognized each other, and while talking to Porter, Purdue kept a pistol in his lap and would not get out of his car.

Jackson also was at the trap house, and he and Purdue were lifelong friends. While talking to Purdue, Jackson began to glare at Porter, who stared back.

When Porter and Purdue could not agree on a price for the marijuana, the two men from Macon started trying to sell children’s clothes from the trunk of their car. As darkness fell, they decided to head for home, traveling south on Winston Road to Head Street and then turning east toward Benning Drive.

There at the stop sign a man with a bicycle waited. When Cheney stopped the car, the man pulled out a pistol and rapidly fired 15 9-mm rounds with a Glock pistol, riddling the Ford’s passenger side with bullet holes.

“This was an ambush. This was an execution. This was not a robbery,” Kelly told jurors, adding that Jackson fled for California immediately afterward, never returning to the Winston Road apartment he rented.

“He was hiding,” Kelly said. “Why was he hiding? Because he was guilty.”

Porter’s later changing his story is not unusual for someone in that Winston Road neighborhood, where residents rarely cooperate with the police, lest they be labeled snitches, Kelly said. “They’re dealing with a code of silence in that neighborhood,” he said of police officers.

He noted that two witnesses in a car behind Cheney’s claimed they could not even say where the gunman was standing.

Jackson, 25, faces charges of malice or intentional murder, felony murder for allegedly killing Cheney while committing the felony of aggravated assault, aggravated assault and using a firearm to commit a felony.

This story was originally published April 11, 2016 at 6:17 PM with the headline "Jury to start deliberating 2013 homicide case today."