On July 28, 2019, 42-year-old George Hosey was killed by gunfire inside a home on 11th Street, just off 1st Avenue in Laurel, Mississippi, turning an ordinary residential block into a crime scene that would haunt the neighborhood and his family for years to come. An online memorial later marked the date and place simply: lost to gun violence in Laurel, Mississippi, leaving behind candles, comments, and a stark record of his age and the day his life ended.
Reports about the killing described how the attack came while Hosey was asleep, a single shot to the head inside the house where he should have been safest. In the quiet early hours of a late-July weekend, the sound of that gunshot shattered more than just glass and plaster; it cut short a life that friends and relatives remembered with the nickname “Squirt,” and it left three children to grow up with memories instead of a father. Online tributes sketched a portrait of a man rooted in Laurel, his story now preserved in a few lines on a memorial page and in the grief of those who lit digital candles in his name.
In the days that followed, Laurel investigators began picking through the fragments of that night, trying to understand who had been inside the residence and what grudges, if any, might have followed Hosey to his bedroom door. As detectives worked the case, attention eventually turned to a young man already entangled with law enforcement: Devante Malik Boyd. Police records from that period show Boyd being arrested at a Laurel residence on University Avenue during the execution of a search warrant, an encounter that placed him in the Jones County Adult Detention Center on unrelated felony allegations.
While he was in custody on those separate charges, authorities charged Boyd with murder in Hosey’s shooting, alleging that he was responsible for the gunfire that struck Hosey as he slept. The murder charge did not immediately send him to trial; instead, the first case to reach a jury was the unrelated aggravated assault and armed robbery that had initially kept him jailed. That proceeding was held at South Central Place, a local venue used for Jones County jury trials, and it was there—under the fluorescent lights and the formal cadence of courtroom testimony—that Boyd’s future first seemed to pivot.
When the jurors returned their verdict on the aggravated assault and armed robbery counts, they found Boyd not guilty. With those felonies cleared and no other convictions holding him, the judge ordered his release from the jail where he had been held since before the murder charge was filed. News reports at the time emphasized the uneasy tension of that moment: a man still described as a suspect in a Laurel homicide walking out of custody after being acquitted of the only charges that had kept him behind bars. The murder case, more complex and still being prepared, remained in the background, tied to Hosey’s name but not yet resolved in a courtroom.
Publicly accessible reporting does not clearly show what ultimately became of the murder charge against Boyd or whether anyone was ever tried and convicted in connection with Hosey’s death. What survives in the online record is a partial story: a man killed by a gunshot while sleeping in a small house off 1st Avenue, a grieving family and three children, an accused suspect whose unrelated charges collapsed at trial, and then a silence where a final verdict might have been. For Laurel, the memory of that July morning lingers in the gap between the violence that ended Hosey’s life and the unanswered questions about who, in the end, was held responsible for it.
