Jimmie Lee Daniel, a 67-year-old Black man, was found dead on February 22, 2017, inside his home on Elder Street in east Macon after the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office received a call from a concerned neighbor. Investigators said he had been shot in the chest, and the quiet domestic setting made the scene feel especially grim: a man killed inside his own home, discovered not by some dramatic police sweep, but because someone nearby feared something was wrong. In the first public reports, authorities treated his death as a homicide and began trying to identify who had been with him and who might have wanted him dead.
Within days, investigators named Phillip Lance Rozier Sr. as the suspect. The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office said Rozier, 54, was arrested on March 1, 2017, at a house on Carroll Street after a Crimestoppers tip and a joint effort involving sheriff’s investigators, Macon Regional Crimestoppers, and the U.S. Marshals Southeastern Regional Fugitive Task Force. He was booked on a murder charge, and news coverage from his first court appearance said he told the judge he was not guilty and was held without bond. Public reporting later added that Rozier was accused of shooting Daniel in February and that Daniel had been found after that neighbor’s call, giving the case the shape of a killing that moved quickly from mystery to accusation.
The case did not stop at the arrest. In May 2017, Rozier was indicted in Bibb County on two counts of felony murder, one count of malice murder, and one count of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Reporting at the time also noted that he had previously been convicted of aggravated assault. As for what came after, the online sources reviewed clearly show the arrest, the no-bond hearing, and the indictment, but they do not clearly show a later trial or conviction in Daniel’s killing. A later obituary published for a Phillip Lance Rozier of Macon/Gray states that he died on August 30, 2018, and that may help explain why the public trail appears to thin out after the indictment, though the available sources reviewed do not directly spell out the final disposition of the homicide case.
