Jowonzia De’Mon Ivey, a 31-year-old Black man from Warrenton, Georgia, was killed in the early-morning hours of July 31, 2016, after a shooting on Depot Street that shattered a small community before daybreak. Authorities said Warrenton police were dispatched around 3:40 a.m. to the 300 block of Depot Street, where Ivey had been shot. He was rushed to University McDuffie Hospital, but he did not survive.
His death quickly became a homicide investigation, with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation joining Warrenton police as his body was sent to the GBI crime lab in Decatur for an autopsy. Reporting from the time also described him as known by family and friends as “Spanky,” a Warrenton man whose funeral followed days later in Norwood, with burial at Shiloh Baptist Church Cemetery.
In the first hours after the shooting, the public picture was spare and tense: a man wounded near the intersection of Hudson Street and Depot Street, officers trying to piece together what had happened, and investigators asking anyone with information to come forward. The case moved quickly. By August 2, 2016, investigators announced the arrest of Martavius Hall, then 30, who was booked into the McDuffie County Detention Center. He was charged with murder and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime. Authorities said at the time that Hall was the person they believed shot Ivey at the Depot Street home, and the arrest gave the case the look of one that might be heading toward a straightforward prosecution.
But the story did not end with the arrest. More than a year later, on October 12, 2017, a Warren County jury found Hall not guilty in the deadly shooting. That public outcome appears to be the last widely reported turn in the case from the online sources located, meaning the man once accused in Ivey’s death was acquitted rather than convicted. Based on those sources, Hall was the only publicly identified suspect tied to the case, and no conviction is reflected in the reporting reviewed. What remains in those accounts is the arc of a case that began in violence and urgency on a summer night in Warrenton, led to a murder arrest within days, and then ultimately ended in court with a not-guilty verdict, leaving behind the record of Ivey’s death but not a conviction for it.
