Kelvin Jurand Thompson, a 22-year-old Black man from Forsyth, Georgia, was killed in the early hours of June 27, 2017, on a dark stretch of rural Pulaski County near Hawkinsville. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, a 911 call came in at about 12:19 a.m. reporting two dead men near the intersection of Woods Road and Sandridge Church Road.
Investigators identified Thompson and a second victim, Robdreckious Jamal Quainton of Warner Robins, and said the preliminary indication was that both men had died from gunshot wounds. Local reporting painted the scene as especially grim: one body was found in the road, while Thompson’s body was discovered in a nearby pond.
As the case unfolded that same day, investigators and the sheriff’s office quickly centered on Dennis Sharod Penix of Eastman. The GBI announced that Penix, then 24, had been arrested in Macon and charged with two counts of malice murder. News reports said the search for him spread into Macon after authorities received information about his whereabouts, and he was captured there by law enforcement working with the Southeastern Regional Fugitive Task Force and the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Danny Brannen publicly described the killings as a drug deal gone wrong, and reporting at the time said Penix had been seen with Thompson and Quainton on the night before the two men were found dead.
What survives online after the first burst of coverage suggests a case that did not end quickly. Later reporting from 2021 still referred to Penix not as a convicted killer in this case, but as a man accused or charged in the 2017 double homicide, which indicates the murder case was still pending publicly at that point. That year, Penix was one of five inmates who escaped from the Pulaski County jail; reports again identified him as a murder suspect in the 2017 killings before authorities recaptured all five escapees, including Penix. In the online sources readily available, there is clear documentation of his arrest and murder charges, but I did not find a reliable publicly accessible source confirming a trial verdict or final conviction specifically for Thompson’s killing.
So the story that emerges is of a young man whose life ended suddenly on a back road outside Hawkinsville, in a double homicide that investigators said began with a bad deal and ended in gunfire. The named suspect was arrested within hours, and the case remained serious enough years later that news outlets still identified him by those murder charges when he escaped custody and was captured again. Based on the online record, the known suspect is Dennis Sharod Penix, and the clearest confirmed legal developments are his 2017 arrest on two counts of malice murder and his later recapture after the 2021 jail escape.
