In a dramatic and at times wrenching sentencing hearing in Bibb County Superior Court on Wednesday, a Macon woman who claimed she had shot a threatening, rock-hurling teenager, critically wounding him, was sentenced to 15 years behind bars.
Prosecutors in the racially charged case have said that Elisabeth Faye Cannon, after she called 911 about supposed trespassers on the evening of Jan. 16, 2017, shot then-15-year-old Vernon Marcus Jr. in the head with a .38-caliber revolver. The prosecutors, however, said there was no evidence that Marcus, who is black, or anyone with him during the encounter had thrown rocks.
Cannon, 48, who is white, was sentenced to 20 years all told, with five of them on probation. The maximum she could have faced was 20 years after she entered a guilty plea for aggravated assault.
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The wounded teen's mother addressed the court and called Cannon's action's "heartless" and told how her son has lost his ability to speak.
Before deciding to plead guilty last week, Cannon, a former nurse, had been set to go on trial for
critically wounding Marcus, whom she claimed she was trying to scare away from her Bloomfield Drive home early last year.
Soon after Cannon was arrested, an investigator said someone who had been with Marcus when the shooting happened had told the authorities that Cannon sometimes "harassed" them when they walked past her house and claimed that they were trying to break in. The investigator went on to say that the person with Marcus "also said that (Cannon) used several racial slurs towards them."
At Wednesday's one-hour-and-45-minute sentencing hearing, which at times bordered on the surreal, Cannon spoke on her own behalf and gave a meandering, rambling account of why she had opened fire. She came across as a deeply angry, disgruntled woman. When the judge asked her to explain what had prompted her to resort to gunfire, Cannon on more than one occasion said she had "visualized" the people who were supposedly threatening her.
In the courtroom behind her, Marcus' father shook his head.
In a prosecutorial flourish, Assistant District Attorney John Regan opened the hearing by stretching a 30-foot tape measure to the back of the room to show that it was nearly twice that far away from Cannon's property, 56 feet, that Marcus had fallen when he was shot. The bullet tore through part of his brain and exited the front of his skull.
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A couple of hours before the shooting, when Cannon called the cops about "loiterers" and
supposed rock-throwers, a man standing with her could be heard on a police video recording of the encounter referring to "these dadgum blacks." Cannon told the officers she was frequently threatened by passing young people, but the officers warned her not to take the law into her own hands.
"Remember," the officer told her, "these are kids."
"I'm not gonna pull the trigger unless I feel like I've been threatened big-time," Cannon replied. She went on that day to claim to have been cussed and called "a b----" at times, and said people walking past her place "wouldn't take their eyes off of us." She also told the officers she had been driven to the point of "infuriation" and might need to brandish her .38 pistol "to scare the (expletive) out of" the youths.
Cannon's 16-year-old daughter has told authorities that Cannon had, unprovoked, used a pellet rifle to shoot someone near their property months earlier. The daughter also has said there had been no threatening actions by Marcus or the teen with him the night Marcus was shot, prosecutors noted.
Cannon's husband, Scott, 46, told the judge Wednesday that Elisabeth Cannon's "mental status is questionable" and that she suffers from anxiety that had grown worse around the time of the shooting. A neighbor testified that she was nervous and "shaking" an hour or so before Marcus was shot.
Marcus, who had been out of school that day for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, had about 7 p.m. that evening walked to a store along nearby Rocky Creek Road to buy snacks and run an errand for a friend's mother. While they were on the way home, Cannon opened fire, prosecutors said.
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Cannon gave her account of the shooting and what led up to it, but her oft-confusing version of events didn't add up — and in fact sometimes seemed as if she was conjuring details as she went. She said "rocks flew" as she stood outside near her front door "and hit everything around me." Then she suggested the supposed assailants had a gun, which they did not. She also said there were three people there threatening her. Prosecutors say Marcus and his friend were the only other people around.
"I was alarmed. I was fearful," she said. "I had to make a split-second decision. ... They continued to stand their ground and continued to make extremely serious, threatening threats at me of the potential that they were gonna shoot me."
She said she fired into the ground. Judge Simms wondered how, then, was Marcus, whom Cannon said was "standing his ground," shot in the back of his head?
Simms also told Cannon that she was "sort of like the boy who cried wolf."
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"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscious stupidity," Regan said. "And that's what we have in this case. We have Mrs. Cannon, who of her own accord, had a gun and was gonna show 'em. ... And on Jan. 16th that's exactly what she did. To two innocent boys walking back from the store. They weren't on her property. They weren't throwing rocks."
Cannon, who did apologize to the wounded boy and his family, also asked for mercy.
"I regret this deeply. ... I've prayed for (Marcus) ever since it happened," she said before asking the judge if she might be sentenced to probation.
"That's not gonna happen," the judge replied.
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