Detavious Jamalcom Milner, a 22-year-old Black man from Rome, Georgia, was killed late on April 7, 2015, in a burst of gunfire at a house on Copeland Street. Early reports said police were sent to the home shortly after 11 p.m. on a call about shots fired. When officers arrived, chaos was already spilling into the street. One wounded person ran toward a patrol car, others were screaming, and investigators soon found that Milner had been shot to death while several other people had also been hit but survived. In those first hours, the case looked like a confused and frantic scene of violence, with detectives chasing leads and trying to piece together who had come into that house and why.
Within two days, Joseph Hamilton Jackson was arrested and accused of entering the home, demanding cash from Milner, and shooting him. He was jailed on a murder charge and held without bond, and for a time he stood as the named suspect in the killing. But the case did not stay that simple. As the investigation deepened, authorities widened their focus beyond one gunman and toward a group attack tied to a robbery. Prosecutors later described the shooting as something that began with a plan to confront Quatevious Johnson over money. According to the evidence later accepted at trial, Zjuantavious Marquis Jackson said Johnson owed him, handed Joseph Jackson a gun, and went with him to the house while Javarick Davon McCain drove them there and later picked them up.
The version that ultimately carried the case forward painted a violent sequence inside the house. A crowd had gathered in a bedroom when the intruders came in and money was demanded at gunpoint. When no one handed anything over, the confrontation turned deadly. Court records later said Joseph Jackson initially pointed the gun into the room and demanded money, but when he did not fire, Zjuantavious Jackson took the weapon and opened fire, fatally wounding Milner and injuring three others, including Johnson. The same records said Johnson was then chased for cash hidden in his sock, and the attackers fled after McCain drove them away. Even so, the witness picture was not perfectly clean. Joseph Jackson testified that Zjuantavious Jackson was the shooter, but some prosecution witnesses had at various points implicated Joseph Jackson, and Johnson identified Joseph Jackson as the shooter while also connecting Zjuantavious Jackson to the robbery. The case that emerged was not just about one shot in one room, but about overlapping accusations, shifting theories, and a robbery that ended with Milner dead.
By late 2016, Floyd County grand jurors had indicted Zjuantavious Marquis Jackson and Javarick Davon McCain in connection with the killing, while Joseph Hamilton Jackson had already been jailed in the case. Zjuantavious Jackson went to trial in March 2017 and was convicted of malice murder and other charges related to the robbery and shootings. He was sentenced to life in prison for murder, along with additional time for armed robbery, firearm offenses, and related counts. He appealed, but the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the convictions in 2018. Reporting from that period also said McCain later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery and participation in criminal street gang activity, while Joseph Jackson remained charged in the case and had testified against Zjuantavious Jackson. In the end, Milner’s death was not left as an unsolved street killing. It became a long, tangled prosecution that started with one immediate arrest, expanded into a three-man case, and ended with at least one murder conviction and a court record that preserved how violently that night on Copeland Street unraveled.
