On the night of May 19, 2024, Timmie Edward Carter, a 44-year-old male from Taylorsville, Mississippi, was fatally shot during a weekend gathering along Carter Dees Road in the Hebron community of Jones County. Law enforcement and subsequent memorial records describe his death as the result of gun violence, placing his final moments just a short drive from his hometown.
Around 10:14 p.m., Jones County sheriff’s deputies were dispatched after a report that shots had been fired and a person had been hit; when Deputies Kalob Broadway and Brock Avera reached 62 Carter Dees Road at about 10:22 p.m., they found Carter lying on his right side in the middle of the roadway, bleeding from the head and appearing to be deceased. A red pickup truck had come to rest near his body, and a crowd of bystanders had gathered in the darkness, turning the rural road into an impromptu crime scene as deputies tried to work their way through shaken witnesses and flashing patrol lights.
Broadway and Avera began the painstaking process of securing the area, starting a crime scene log within minutes of arrival so that investigators could document who came and went from the stretch of pavement where Carter fell. In the first frantic minutes, Broadway spoke with an unidentified woman who told him that the shooter was believed to be in a maroon four-door car, a detail that would quickly shape the search for suspects. Deputies held the perimeter, kept the crowd back and waited for investigators while the body remained where it was found, the red truck idling as a kind of grim marker of where the night had turned fatal. The incident was later categorized in a national gun-violence database as a bar or club–related shooting, suggesting that the violence grew out of a social setting rather than a random encounter, echoing a local newspaper headline that described the case as a deadly shooting at a club.
Within about twenty-four hours, the investigation had moved from chaotic scene work to specific names. According to statements from the Jones County Sheriff’s Department reported by local and national outlets, 18-year-old Kantravious Haynes of Taylorsville was arrested and identified as the primary suspect in Carter’s killing, facing a charge of murder in connection with the shooting on Carter Dees Road. Two others were taken into custody alongside him: Lucas Jones, also 18 and from Taylorsville, and 20-year-old Dytayshia Smith of Laurel. Online jail and court records, as well as subsequent news coverage, list Jones and Smith as being charged with accessory after the fact, accused not of firing the fatal shots but of helping Haynes in the aftermath of the crime. Their arrests were logged on May 20, 2024, in Jones County booking records, which note Haynes as held on the murder charge and Jones and Smith on single counts of accessory after the fact, all arrested by the Jones County Sheriff’s Office.
A brief summary entry in the Gun Violence Archive, drawing from law-enforcement and court information, describes the case as involving three people arrested and later indicted, with the shooting tied to a juke-joint or club environment and a firearm that was reportedly stolen from the suspect’s mother. While those notes offer only a glimpse of the evidence behind the charges, they align with the picture painted by local coverage: a late-night gathering, a sudden eruption of gunfire, and a young local man accused of bringing a stolen gun into that volatile mix. At each stage, authorities have emphasized that Haynes, Jones, and Smith are charged but not convicted in connection with Carter’s death, and they remain presumed innocent unless and until a court determines otherwise.
Carter’s name now appears in the National Gun Violence Memorial’s listing for Taylorsville, one of a small number of fatal shootings recorded for the town and surrounding area, and his individual page marks May 19, 2024, as the date he was “lost to gun violence” without yet adding biographical details or a photograph. Local and derivative national articles about the shooting end with the same note from Jones County officials: the investigation is ongoing, and the pursuit of justice for what they have called a senseless tragedy continues. As of the latest publicly accessible reporting, there are no widely reported trial dates or sentencing outcomes for the defendants, leaving Carter’s case suspended in that space between arrest and resolution, carried forward in court dockets, sheriff’s records, and the quiet memorial pages that catalogue lives ended by gunfire.
