Tanuska Janay Jackson, a 31-year-old Black woman from Columbus, Georgia, was killed in a shooting shortly after midnight on March 5, 2021, inside an apartment on Torch Hill Road in the Eagles Trace complex. Public reports and gun-violence records place the killing at that residence and identify Jackson as the person who died there that night. Memorial and obituary pages published after her death show how quickly the loss rippled through the people who knew her, preserving the memory of a woman
whose life ended violently in her own home.
The case that emerged from the reporting was especially grim because children were present in the apartment when the violence unfolded. Accounts carried in local-news mirrors said Jackson was in the middle of an argument with Dexter Potts, described as her ex-boyfriend, when the confrontation escalated. Investigators said the oldest child, a 13-year-old daughter, came into the room during the dispute, and Potts threatened the girl with the gun before turning it on Jackson and shooting her in the head. The scene that authorities later described was one of terror inside a family space: Jackson wounded fatally, her children nearby, and the oldest child forced into the center of the chaos.
According to the same reporting, Potts did not flee into the night and disappear. Instead, he allegedly called 911 after the shooting and told the dispatcher he had killed Jackson. Officers said he left the gun in the bedroom where her body lay and then met police outside. That quickly turned him from the obvious suspect into the arrested defendant in the case, and gun-violence records list Dexter Potts as the subject-suspect, unharmed and arrested. In the early telling of the case, police testimony painted the relationship as troubled and volatile, with Jackson’s daughter telling investigators that the couple fought constantly.
The prosecution did not end with the original murder accusation. Later court reporting said Potts, then 27, reached a plea agreement with prosecutors rather than take the case to a full murder trial. Under that deal, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault in Jackson’s death. The aggravated-assault count reflected the allegation that he pointed the gun at the teenage daughter before firing the fatal shot at Jackson. Based on the available reporting I found, Potts is the only identified suspect publicly tied to the killing, and I did not find credible online reporting naming additional suspects or describing a broader conspiracy.
So the arc of the case, as it appears in online sources, begins with a domestic argument in a Columbus apartment and ends with Jackson dead, five children in the home, an immediate arrest, and the accused later admitting guilt to reduced charges. The public record available online is fuller on the killing and the plea than on any later sentencing outcome, but it consistently points to the same conclusion: Jackson’s death was not treated as an unsolved mystery. Authorities identified Dexter Potts as the man responsible, arrested him, and the case moved forward until it concluded with his guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault.
