In the pre-dawn hours of January 20, 2017, the quiet of Holly Springs Road in Rockmart, Georgia, was shattered by the sound of gunfire. Responding to a 911 call at approximately 4:17 a.m., Paulding County Sheriff's deputies arrived to a grim discovery. In a ditch alongside the road lay the body of a White male, Ronald Chadwick Morgan, a 31-year-old resident of the area. It was determined that he had been riding his motorcycle when he was fatally shot.
The investigation into Morgan's death quickly gained momentum, and within days, authorities had identified and apprehended three suspects. Austin James Nicholson, 22, Carlos Fredrico Hightower, 26, and Magan Darleen Carroll, 24, all from Rockmart, were taken into custody. Investigators believed the murder stemmed from an ongoing dispute between Morgan and the suspects concerning property. All three were initially charged with felony murder and held in the Paulding County Detention Center without bond.
The narrative of the crime that emerged indicated a calculated ambush. Prosecutors stated that Hightower had instructed his friends, Nicholson and Carroll, to drop him off on the side of the road near the entrance to Carroll's neighborhood. They were to return to her house without him and await his call. As Morgan passed by on his motorcycle, Hightower opened fire, causing him to crash into an embankment. An autopsy would later reveal that Morgan had been shot five times: twice in the torso, twice in the shoulder, and once in the back of the head. After the shooting, Hightower called his accomplices to pick him up.
In a dark turn of events that underscored the brutality of the crime, the case took another violent twist. Two years after the initial arrests, Carlos Hightower would go on to murder his co-defendant, Austin Nicholson, in an effort to prevent him from testifying. In February 2020, facing the mountain of evidence against him, Carlos Hightower pleaded guilty to his role in the crime spree. For the murder of Ronald Chadwick Morgan and the subsequent killing of his accomplice, Hightower was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. Following their arrests, both Nicholson and Carroll had been granted a $27,700 bond, which they posted in February 2017.
