Marlon Jamal Underwood, a 22-year-old Black man from Garden City, was shot on the evening of October 4, 2015, at the El Cheapo gas station at Middleground Road and Tibet Avenue in Savannah. Police said officers were called there at about 7:15 p.m. and found him wounded; he was rushed to a nearby hospital but did not survive. In the first hours after the killing, the case was treated as a homicide with few public answers, just the hard outline of a young man struck down in a parking lot and investigators asking the public for help piecing together what had happened.
The fuller account emerged later in court. According to the evidence summarized by the Supreme Court of Georgia, Anthony Martin had saved Underwood's phone number under a slang label meaning a robbery target, and on October 4 the two exchanged calls and text messages arranging to meet at the gas station under the pretense of buying marijuana. Underwood arrived in a red SUV and stayed in the driver's area with the engine running while Martin and another man approached. The court said Underwood produced a digital scale and several large baggies of marijuana, and a struggle followed. Surveillance video captured part of the confrontation as it shifted across the lot toward the store. At 7:13 p.m., the man who was with Martin fired a. 22-caliber pistol, striking Underwood in the left side of the chest. The two men then ran, while Underwood staggered toward the convenience-store door, dropped his phone, and collapsed. Officers arriving within moments found the scene scattered with marijuana and the remnants of the struggle, but no gun.
The investigation stretched well beyond the night of the shooting. On April 5, 2017, Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police and the Southeast Fugitive Task Force announced the arrests of two suspects: Mylek Bigham, who was found at a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, and Anthony Martin, who was located at a correctional facility in Monroe County, Georgia. Both were charged in Underwood's killing, and a Chatham County grand jury later indicted them on murder and related charges. But the case did not end the same way for both men. At a March 2018 trial, Bigham was acquitted of all charges. Martin was acquitted on some counts, including malice murder, but convicted on others, including felony murder based on aggravated assault with intent to rob and a firearm charge. He was originally sentenced to life without parole plus five years, then resentenced to life with the possibility of parole plus a consecutive five-year term after post-trial review. In 2023, the Supreme Court of Georgia upheld Martin's convictions, leaving him as the one defendant held criminally responsible in court for the killing of Marlon Jamal Underwood.
