Online reports identify the victim as William Jones, an 85-year-old man from the Montgomery area whose life ended after a daytime shooting on May 14, 2021. That afternoon, police and fire medics were sent to the 2900 block of Pelzer Avenue after word came in that two people had been shot. When first responders arrived, they found Jones and an adult woman suffering from life-threatening gunshot wounds. Both were rushed to a local hospital, but Jones did not survive.
Later obituary reporting said he died on May 17, 2021, suggesting he lingered for a short time after the shooting before succumbing to his injuries.
What began as a critical-injury shooting quickly turned into a homicide investigation. Within days, Montgomery police publicly named Ronnie Hawkins, 27, of Montgomery, as the suspect. Authorities said he was charged with one count of capital murder and one count of attempted murder, and that he was taken into custody and booked into the Montgomery County Detention Facility. The adult female victim survived the initial attack, and the attempted murder charge reflected that second shooting victim. At the time police released Hawkins’s name, investigators said the circumstances were still under investigation and did not publicly lay out a fuller motive in the reports that remain easily accessible online.
The case carries the feel of a sudden eruption of violence in broad daylight: one elderly victim, one surviving woman, and a neighborhood block transformed in minutes into a crime scene. Early coverage on the day of the shooting described both victims as critically injured before Jones’s death was announced. Later reporting tied the homicide directly to Hawkins’s arrest, making him the only publicly identified suspect found in open online sources I was able to verify.
As for what happened after the arrest, the open web leaves the story frustratingly incomplete. Publicly accessible reporting confirms the arrest and charges, and a Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office inmate-search result later associated Ronnie James Hawkins Jr. with capital murder and attempting-to-commit-murder charges, but I did not find a reliably accessible online source confirming a trial, plea, conviction, or final court resolution in Jones’s case. So the clearest online trail ends with the shooting, Jones’s death, Hawkins’s arrest, and the serious charges that followed.
