Jimmie Sellers II, a 27-year-old Black man, was killed in Rome, Georgia, on February 28, 2016, after a night that turned from tension into bloodshed. According to court records, the trouble began late on February 27 when Briones Ladon Wofford and his girlfriend, Tennah Gueh, went to a nightclub in Rome. In the early morning hours, Sellers arrived there with his brother, Denier Floyd. Outside the club, Wofford approached Floyd while he was talking with women and pulled out a pistol. When he refused to put the gun away, Sellers and Floyd chose to leave rather than let the confrontation grow worse.
But the night did not end there. Sellers and Floyd drove to a house in south Rome where Mardell Blackburn was living, only to find Wofford there in the front yard. Sellers confronted him about what had happened at the club, and the argument quickly became physical. Sellers punched Wofford in the face and knocked him to the ground. As Blackburn stepped in and started walking with Sellers across the street, Wofford grabbed the pistol that had fallen from his pants and opened fire. One shot struck Blackburn in the head. Then, as panic spread and Sellers tried to move away, Wofford chased him around a parked car, still shooting. The encounter ended with Sellers stopping and asking, in words preserved by the court, whether Wofford was really going to kill him like that. Wofford then shot him in the head. Blackburn survived his wounds, but Sellers died.
The case moved quickly into the criminal courts. A Floyd County grand jury indicted Briones Ladon Wofford in May 2016 on charges that included malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Tennah Gueh was also indicted as a codefendant, but the charges against her were later dropped. Wofford was tried alone before a jury in May 2017, and he was found guilty on all counts.
The sentence reflected how brutally the shooting had unfolded. Wofford received life without the possibility of parole for malice murder, along with additional prison time for the attack on Blackburn and the firearm offenses. He later challenged the outcome, arguing on appeal that he had been denied effective assistance of counsel. In April 2019, the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected that argument and left the murder conviction in place. The justices did rule that one aggravated assault count involving Blackburn should have merged with an aggravated battery count because both came from the same gunshot, so that one part of the sentence was vacated, but the rest of the judgment stood. In the end, the courts left no real doubt about who was held responsible for Jimmie Sellers II’s death: Briones Ladon Wofford was arrested, prosecuted, convicted of murder, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison without parole.
