Meatloaf is dead. M&M’s Are Sexist. It snowed in the CSRA Friday. Grocery shelves are empty. Gasoline and grocery prices are soaring.
President Joe Biden is focused on Russia invading the Ukraine border while millions of ILLEGAL aliens stream across the U.S border, many to be flown to American cities in the middle of the night by the Biden administration.
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Democrats are busily plotting how to steal another election. The public schools, colleges and universities are indoctrinating your children with Marxist ideology and hatred for their country. Police who are supposed to protect us are under attack. Violent crime is out of control while prosecution has become a political liability for woke officials.
Augusta’s Homeless Task Force is busy trying to feed, clothe and house the homeless population who contribute nothing to society with predictable results: If you want more bad behavior, reward it.
Just look at Austin, Texas; Los Angeles and New York City, among others where governments are spending billions more on their soaring numbers of riffraff than on small businesses and family and children’s services.
Otherwise, it’s good to be alive. And God is great!
Doesn’t Pass the Smell Test
Speaking of crime and prosecution being a political liability for the woke crowd, what happened to the murder charges against Antoine Redfield and Charvez Lawson who were in a shootout that killed Charles Lawson III and JaBrie S. Dominguez in 2019?
They were dismissed, and now 8-year-old Aubrie Anthony is dead, along with the horse she’d been petting, and gangbanger Redfield has been charged for gunning them down in a drive-by shooting at Dogwood Terrace Apartments on Second Avenue.
Then-Richmond County District Attorney Natalie Paine had Redfield and Lawson indicted on murder and other charges before being defeated by current DA Jared Williams, who dismissed all charges, making Redfield a free man in November, ready to continue his life of crime.
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Williams said the charges were dropped because the DA’s office couldn’t prove the two gangsters claims of self-defense weren’t true.
Well, what about possession of a gun by a convicted felon? The DA said no guns were found. Then how were Charles Lawson III and Dominguez shot to death? Hmmm. Something’s rotten in Denmark.
Redfield had been held without bond since the Dec. 2019, shootout in the parking lot of the Private I Sports and Entertainment Complex.
Grilling the Wrong Ones
The Private I? Hmm, that rang a bell. Then I remembered that gun fight in that club’s parking lot, and an Augusta Commission committee dancing around the sheriff’s request to suspend or revoke the club’s alcohol and business licenses and ending up not doing either.
Then the committee curtsied and bowed and approved the license holder’s request to add a license to allow it to become a dancehall.
At the time, Richmond County sheriff’s Investigator Jose Ortiz told commissioners that crime had been escalating at the club, including three people being shot and killed on the property in 2018, and the double homicide of Charles Lawson III and Dominguez. The previous year’s reports included robberies, fights, guns and drugs inside and outside the club on Thomas Lane behind the former Regency Mall.
Instead of condemning the violence, commissioners grilled Ortiz about the activities of sheriff’s deputies who work the parking lot rather than the management that was keeping the club open until 4 a.m. in violation of their license.
After peppering Ortiz with questions about what special-duty deputies were supposed to do during closing time and such, then-Commissioner Bill Fennoy said, “I’m trying to find out why there is a issue of what time they close when we have members of the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department who supposedly know what the law says.”
Ortiz said the club originally had a restaurant license that allowed it to stay open until 4 a.m., but had turned it in without notifying the sheriff’s department. He also said that when he asked who decided to keep the club open until 4 a.m., nobody could tell him, which made him think that a person who couldn’t get their own license was having someone else hold it.
Commissioner Bobby Williams asked Ortiz whether he thought management should be responsible for something that started somewhere else?
”I don’t think they should be responsible for something that started somewhere else, but you have a common theme there where you have a guy who got shot in 2018 being the same guy who robbed someone in 2019, being the same guy who shot someone December 2019,” Ortiz said.
“He should have been in jail by now,” Williams replied.
“You’re absolutely right. He should have been in jail,” Ortiz replied. “We lock a lot of people up, but they get out. He posted bond and got out.”
Fennoy made a motion to leave the business license as it is and for “Private I” to get with the sheriff’s office to talk about recommendations to improve the safety and security of employees and patrons.
How can Augusta ever move forward with elected officials like that?
An “Easy Robbery” Gone Wrong
Here’s the lead on Reporter Sandy Hodson’s story in The Augusta Press about another senseless killing, where the perpetrators show no concern for someone else’s property or life:
“It was just a crime of opportunity for four young people who thought a nice watch was reason for a robbery attempt that turned into a murder, one of the participants said Thursday, Jan. 20 during a Richmond County Superior Court hearing.”
In January 2020, teenager Janiah Sullivan messaged Rian R. Stone and Carlos Mack that the guy she was with had a nice watch and it would be an easy robbery.
So Ebonee Jones, who was hanging out in an apartment complex with Stone and Mack, drove Mack to meet up with Stone on Winston Way to rob 21-year-old Deivante A. McFadden. When McFadden tried to drive away, one of the two men shot him and left him alone to die.
Thursday, Jones pleaded guilty to criminal attempt to commit armed robbery, a crime punishable by up to 30 years, although if she fulfills her side of the plea negotiation and testifies truthfully next week, she will be sentenced to no more than 10 years in prison. Her attorney, Keith Johnson, told the judge she wants to be sentenced as a first offender. That will erase the conviction from her criminal record if she successfully completes her sentence, Hodson wrote.
Well, I guess she does want to be sentenced as a first offender and have her conviction erased from her criminal record.
What ever happened to the driver of a vehicle in a bank robbery or other crimes that cause the death of an innocent person being charged the same as the ones who did the robbery?
First offender? We can only hope that’s just wishful thinking on her lawyer’s part.
Recycled
Since I was under the weather last week, I wasn’t able to come up with something up to my usual high standard, I’m going to repeat something I wrote several years ago. I’ll think you’ll like.
Danger! Uncle Ray Inside
I received an email from my cousin Carla Ross Hornbuckle in Tifton, who said she was getting ready for the Ross reunion, and she asked whether I could help her find some of the columns I wrote when I worked at The Valdosta Daily Times about Mama Ross and other members of the Ross clan so she could read them at the reunion. I e-mailed her back to say if we couldn’t find them, I would write some more, a whole book that would certainly include a chapter about her daddy, Ray Ross, the practical joker. I am surprised he died of natural causes rather than getting shot by somebody he played a trick on.
Uncle Ray had a box labeled, “Danger! Mongoose Inside!” Of course, nobody in South Georgia had ever seen a mongoose, and when the curious would come over to look at it, he would spring the latch, and a coonskin cap would fly out and scare them to death. But that was the least of his devilment.
A Pearl of Great Value
Another chapter would be about our grandmother, Mama Ross, whose name was Pearl. She was the cleverest woman I’ve ever known. She went fishing every day of her adult life she could, could hoot at the owls in the deep river swamp near her house in Chula and get them to hoot back.
Mama Ross could go sound asleep floating on her back in the millpond, her dress floating out around her like a lily pad. She read detective stories and always knew who the murderer would turn out to be.
She lived to be 97 and spent her last few years in a nursing home in Tifton, begging anybody who dropped by on their way to somewhere else to stay, one of my greatest regrets is not staying longer and listening more. After all, how many people saw Halley’s Comet and still remembered it?
A Legacy in Her Own Time
And, of course, I’d have to have my own chapter.
I once chewed four packs of Juicy Fruit gum at once just because I wanted to. And I used to love the smell of Vitalis hair tonic, so I got a bottle and rubbed it on my face and up my nose and got so sick and dizzy I fell down in the front yard and threw up.
My older sister, June – the perfect one – said I was a nut. Mama said I was just happy-go-lucky. But most people agreed with June. That’s why they blackballed me from Sigma Delta Sigma, a sorority of Tifton debutantes, being a member of which was akin to being on the social register of Alligator, Miss. But I didn’t care about being blackballed. I didn’t want to go to meetings and work on projects. I was wild and free, doing flips in our front yard and dreaming of being in the circus or playing with the stray animals and staying up all night reading. The night I read “Black Beauty” I couldn’t stop crying until the next day.
Was that normal?
Anyway, when I didn’t get into the SDS, June said she had to take a stand.
“Why you’re a legacy,” she said.
I didn’t know what a legacy was, but I knew it was something I didn’t want to be.
So, she resigned, but it didn’t hurt her any. She was still the most popular girl in school, and all her boyfriend’s drove big cars. They all turned out to be losers though.
Much thanks to Staff Writer Sandy Hodson for her contributions to this week’s column.
Sylvia Cooper is a Columnist with The Augusta Press. Reach her at sylvia.cooper@theaugustapress.com
