Augusta resident James Bartell Smiley III was gunned down in broad daylight in January 2017. His case remains unsolved.
The victim’s family the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office has allowed the case to go cold, showing no intention to solve the brazen shooting and to help bring the family closure.
Indeed, the family said that the Sheriff’s Office has blocked their attempts to help identify Smiley’s killer and has never returned his personal belongings that were gathered at the crime scene.
On Jan. 11, 2017, deputies were called to a shooting that occurred at 2:30 p.m. near 1007 Carrie St., a residential neighborhood in East Augusta. Upon arrival, officers found Smiley dead of multiple gunshot wounds to the head and neck.
At least one witness saw a black male with dreadlocks approach the Smiley’s vehicle occupied begin firing into his Mercedes, according to the coroner’s report.
In an attempt to flee, Smiley, in his dying moments, gunned the accelerator of the vehicle that then slammed into several parked cars and a mailbox before hitting a tree and coming to rest.
Smiley, who was sitting behind the wheel of his wrecked car when was pronounced dead at the scene, had two cell phones and $430 with him when he died. Deputies took those items into evidence.
Smiley’s mother, Melissa Walker, said she knows exactly why her son had that amount of cash on his person.
“Bartell told me he was going to buy a new bowling ball. He was part of a bowling league and he wanted to get himself a new ball, and someone over in South Carolina was going to sell it to him. I told him to be careful because you never know about people selling stuff on the internet, but he never even made it to South Carolina that day,” Walker said.
According to Walker, the Sheriff’s Office acted as if the murder was possibly a drug deal gone wrong, and no one in the office ever really attempted to identify the dreadlocked suspect who a witness said approached the car with a gun.
“Bartell didn’t smoke, didn’t do any drugs and really didn’t drink much. I know he was not out there to buy drugs,” she said.
Smiley, who was 28 at the time of his death, did have a charge of criminal trespass from 2015, but Walker said her son, who was employed by Davis Appliance at the time of his death, was not involved in any nefarious activities.
“Bartell was very popular with the ladies, and that did get him into trouble once. But was he a criminal? No he wasn’t. And he didn’t associate himself with criminals. He just didn’t. He hung out with his friends in the bowling league,” Walker said.
Smiley’s sister, Tanya Rolland, said she was stunned when a woman showed up at the funeral claiming to have been on the phone with Smiley in the moments before gunshots rang out.
“This lady just called herself ‘Robbie’ and said she was on the phone with him when it sounded like a scuffle occurred. I asked her if she had talked with the investigators and she said no, that no one had contacted her,” Rolland said. “She claimed to be the last person to speak to him, and the investigators never tried to interview her. To this day, I don’t know what she might have known about it. She disappeared after the funeral.”
If the mysterious Robbie had been on the phone with Smiley at the time of the crime, then the number should have been immediately traceable, but according to Smiley’s family, the Sheriff’s Office never followed up.
According to Walker and Rolland, the Sheriff’s office took into custody the money, cell phones and Smiley’s wallet, and none of those belongings were returned to the family. Rolland said that Smiley’s cell phones were handed over to his girlfriend, who owned the car he was in when the murder occurred.
“Those cell phone records could have been the key to help solve this,” Rolland said. “But the phones are gone. They disappeared, and they (Sheriff’s Office) never returned any of his personal stuff they found on him to us.”
Rolland and Walker also said that people were pledging to donate to a reward fund to help identify the killer, but the Sheriff’s Office put the brakes on that effort as well.
“They told us not to offer a reward because they didn’t want people calling up just to try and collect a reward, and I am thinking, ‘Isn’t that why you offer a reward?’” Rolland said.
Rolland said that it seemed to her and her family that the Sheriff’s Office was ready to write off the murder as just another killing that occured in the inner city and for which no suspect would ever be found.
“They finally told me to stop calling and bugging them,” Walker said. “But I’m Bartell’s mother. I just want closure. I want to know who killed my son. He didn’t deserve that, and the police just treat it as something routine. As a mother, it really hurts not to get some closure. I try to just think of him and how he lived, not how he died.”
Scott Hudson is the Editorial Page Editor of The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
