Cenquaz Jermaine Perry, a 17-year-old Black male from Quitman, Georgia, was killed on August 28, 2020, in a shooting that shook his hometown and hit especially hard because he was known as a Brooks County High School football player with his life still unfolding in front of him. Investigators said the violence happened in the early morning hours at the Woodmere Apartments on Barwick Road in Quitman. According to law enforcement accounts published after the killing, Perry was inside his home and asleep when gunfire came from outside. The shots were fired through the exterior of the apartment, turning what should have been the safest place in his world into the scene of his death. He was found with gunshot wounds and later died, leaving behind grieving family, teammates, classmates, and a community trying to understand how someone so young could be targeted in that way.
In the days after the shooting, the case drew the attention of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which was asked to assist the Quitman Police Department. Public reporting described the killing as a murder investigation from the start, and the details made it especially haunting: Perry was not out in a confrontation, not caught in a crowded street scene, but struck while sleeping in his own home. Stories from the time reflected the sorrow around Brooks County football, where coaches and players spoke of trying to carry on while mourning a teammate whose death felt both personal and brutal. For a while, though, the case appeared to move in silence publicly, with grief out front and answers harder to find.
The first major break that surfaced publicly came years later. In February 2023, authorities announced the arrest of JayKeith Jamar Davis of Quitman. He was charged with murder in connection with Perry’s death, and law enforcement also said he faced four counts under the Georgia Criminal Street Gang Act. Reports indicated Davis was already in the Brooks County Jail on unrelated charges when the murder charge was added in Perry’s case. That development suggested investigators had continued building the case long after the 2020 shooting, and that they believed the killing was tied to more than a random act.
Another arrest followed in June 2023, widening the circle around the case. Authorities announced that Quadarious Marquand Byrdsong was arrested in Lowndes County on warrants out of Brooks County in connection with Perry’s death. Published reports said Byrdsong was charged with murder, aggravated assault, and four counts of the Georgia Street Gang Act, then transferred to the Brooks County jail. With that second arrest, the case no longer looked like a mystery with no suspects at all; it had become a prosecution involving multiple accused men and allegations that investigators believed gang-related criminal conduct was connected to the murder.
What stands out in the public record is how long the road to those arrests seemed to be. Perry was killed in August 2020, but the named suspects were not publicly arrested until 2023. That gap gave the case the shape of a long-buried wound in Quitman, one that never really closed. The image that remains at the center of it is devastatingly simple: a teenager asleep at home, and bullets coming through the wall in the middle of the night. That detail has followed every later report because it captures the cruelty of the crime better than any official phrasing could.
As for the case’s later court history, the online sources located clearly reported the two arrests and the charges against Davis and Byrdsong, but they did not provide a confirmed published update showing a trial, plea, or conviction in Perry’s killing. Based on the available reporting, the publicly documented developments center on the homicide investigation and those arrests rather than a final courtroom resolution.
