Trey Marcellous Smith, a 30-year-old man from Macon, Georgia, died on February 13, 2022, after a burst of violence in the parking lot of the Quick Serve gas station at 584 Emery Highway. According to the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office, the shooting happened just before 9:30 p.m. Deputies arrived to find Smith and another Macon man, Debarius Devonte Sanford, wounded inside a vehicle. Both were rushed to the hospital, but neither survived. In those first public accounts, investigators said they were still trying to piece together what led to the gunfire, and the scene carried the confusion and shock that so often follows a sudden public killing: a car sitting in a convenience-store lot, two men gravely injured inside, and a community left to wonder what had happened in the final minutes before deputies arrived.
In the immediate aftermath, authorities said the gunman had fled. The sheriff’s office described the suspect as a medium-build male dressed in dark clothing, with a mask and hood covering his face, last seen running down Womack Street. That image gave the case the shape of a frantic manhunt, with investigators appealing for help while trying to reconstruct a shooting that had unfolded fast and left almost no public explanation behind. No one else was reported injured, but the violence had clearly reached beyond the two men in the car. The charges later filed by investigators would suggest that children were present closely enough to the attack for prosecutors to treat the case not only as murder, but as a crime that exposed young witnesses to extreme danger.
Three days later, on February 16, 2022, the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office announced an arrest. Deputies, working with the U.S. Marshals Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force and acting on a tip to Macon Regional CrimeStoppers, took a 16-year-old Macon suspect into custody at a residence in the 1300 block of Sanford Drive. Authorities said the arrest happened without incident at about 4:00 p.m. The teen was booked into the Macon Regional Youth Detention Center and charged with two counts of murder, two counts of cruelty to children in the first degree, and four counts of aggravated assault. At that point, the case seemed to be moving with force toward prosecution, and publicly it appeared investigators believed they had found the person responsible for the deaths of Smith and Sanford.
But the case did not end with the arrest. Later public reporting identified the defendant as Dylan Sampson Smith and stated that a Bibb County jury found him not guilty on all charges in the deaths of Trey Marcel Smith and Debarius Devonte Sanford. That verdict, reported as coming down on August 9, left the double killing without a conviction in the man’s death. So the public record tells a story that begins with a deadly shooting in an East Macon gas-station parking lot, turns sharply with the arrest of a teenage suspect, and then shifts again in court, where the accused was acquitted. What remains, even after the arrest and trial, is the stark fact of Trey Marcellous Smith’s death on that February night and the lingering sense of a case that brought an answer from investigators, but not a guilty verdict from a jury.
