Rico Jabar King, a 26-year-old Black man from Decatur, Georgia, was killed on the night of June 4, 2019, in the Belvedere Park area when gunfire shattered the evening at an apartment complex on Belvedere Lane. DeKalb County police were called at about 10:15 p.m. after reports of shots fired, and when officers arrived they found King dead at the scene with multiple gunshot wounds.
Early reporting described the scene as the aftermath of a sudden, violent confrontation, with witnesses saying there had been an argument just before the shots rang out.
In the first days after the killing, the case moved quickly from a fatal shooting investigation to a manhunt. Authorities said the dispute before the shooting pointed them toward a suspect, and within about eight days the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office Fugitive Unit arrested Joe Eakmond Morris, 37, of Decatur. Public reports said an arrest warrant issued on June 5 alleged that Morris caused King’s death by shooting him multiple times with a handgun on Belvedere Lane. He was taken into custody at a Decatur hotel and booked into the DeKalb County Jail on a felony murder charge.
The story that emerges from the available online coverage is of a killing that appeared to grow out of an argument and then ended almost as quickly as it began, leaving King dead where he fell and setting off an urgent search for the man investigators believed was responsible. News coverage and public reporting available online identify Morris as the suspect and describe his arrest and the felony murder charge, but the sources located in this review do not clearly show a later public outcome such as a trial, plea, or conviction in King’s case.
