Traquavis Holloway, a 14-year-old Black male from Warner Robins, was killed on February 3, 2024, after what should have been an ordinary Saturday night turned into chaos near the Galleria Cinema on Margie Drive. According to local reporting and police information cited by those outlets, officers were called around 9 p.m. to Hutchinson Mitsubishi Service for a fight involving teenagers. When police arrived, they heard several gunshots, and in the confusion that followed, Traquavis was struck and taken to the hospital, where he later died. Another teen, 15, was also wounded, suffering a graze to the shoulder. Traquavis’s father later said he had only recently dropped his son off at the movies before getting the call that changed everything.
Reports that followed painted the scene as fast-moving and heartbreaking. Police said the suspected shooter ran from officers after the gunfire, but officers caught up with him, arrested him that night, and recovered a gun. Later coverage said the shooting happened after a group of teens had been kicked out of the theater and an argument spilled outside, with Traquavis described in one report as not being involved in the argument before he was shot. In the days after his death, his family and the broader Warner Robins community mourned him not just as a victim in a crime story, but as a boy whose presence filled a room and whose death shook the city.
As the case moved through court, the suspect was identified in later reporting as Terence Howard Jr. Coverage from March 2026 said Howard, then 15, had been 13 at the time of the shooting. He went to trial facing serious charges that included malice murder, felony murder, three counts of aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. The case appears to have centered in part on whether the shooting was criminal or justified, with later reports noting that the defense argued self-defense while prosecutors contended the killing was not justified.
The trial ended with a conviction, though not on the top murder count. A Houston County jury found Howard guilty of voluntary manslaughter, two counts of aggravated assault, and possession of a weapon during a felony. He was sentenced to 37 years, with the first 32 years to be served in prison. After sentencing, one report said the defense raised the steps needed to seek a new trial and file an appeal. For Traquavis’s family, the verdict brought accountability, but not peace; local coverage described their reaction as grief that had never really lifted, only hardened into the determination to keep his name alive and to push back against the violence that took him.
In the months after his death, Traquavis’s family turned mourning into public action. Their loss became part of a larger call in Warner Robins to confront youth violence, with relatives and community members organizing peace walks and anti-violence efforts in his memory. That arc gives the case an especially painful shape: a teenager dropped off for a movie, a fight that escalated into gunfire, an arrest made almost immediately, and then a long wait through the courts before a sentence was finally handed down. Even after the conviction, the story remained less about a courtroom ending than about the empty place Traquavis left behind in his family and community.
