Owen James Hicks, a 20-year-old White male from Kingston in Floyd County, was gravely wounded in Rome, Georgia, on June 2, 2016, during what authorities and local reports described as a reckless episode involving a 9 mm pistol inside a bedroom at a home on Bell’s Ferry Road. Accounts of the case said Hicks was with his friend Cody Throneberry when the gun discharged and struck Hicks in the face. He was rushed to a local hospital and lingered for several days before dying from his injuries on June 5, 2016. Away from the violence of that bedroom, the portrait that emerged afterward was of a young man rooted in northwest Georgia life: a 2014 Model High School graduate who had attended Georgia Highlands College, worked at Profile Industries, and spent his time hunting, gaming with friends, and working out.
The case did not remain an unnamed mystery. Investigators identified Throneberry as the other central figure almost immediately, and later moved forward with criminal charges rather than treating the shooting as a simple accident with no legal consequences. Reporting on the arrest said Throneberry, then 20 and also from Rome, was taken into custody on June 22, 2016, and charged in connection with Hicks’s death. The charges publicly reported against him were involuntary manslaughter, misdemeanor pointing a gun at another, and reckless conduct. The picture painted by those reports was of two young men handling a firearm carelessly, a moment of horseplay or recklessness turning catastrophic in seconds and leaving one dead and the other facing prosecution.
The legal case ended with a guilty plea rather than a trial verdict. In early February 2017, Throneberry was reported to have pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and pointing a gun at another in the shooting death of Hicks. He was sentenced to five years in prison, followed by five years on probation after release. Some reports noted that prosecutors had sought a harsher sentence, but the court ultimately imposed the five-year prison term. No broader conspiracy, additional suspects, or multiple arrests surfaced in the coverage located online; the reporting consistently centered on Throneberry as the only person arrested and prosecuted in the death.
What remains in the online record is the stark contrast between the ordinary details of Hicks’s life and the senseless way it ended. He was not described as dying in a robbery, feud, or street ambush, but in a private room where familiarity and misplaced confidence around a gun proved fatal. The later arrest, guilty plea, and prison sentence gave the case a legal conclusion, yet the story that emerges from the sources is still one of a young life cut short by a split second of recklessness among friends, followed by a family and community left to absorb the loss after Hicks succumbed to the wound three days after the shooting.
