A bullet grazed him at 13. At 25, gunfire left him dead on the same street.
MACON — He was a kid back then when a stray bullet sailed through the cab of his grandfather’s pickup truck and grazed his head.
Charleston “Brother” Burnett III had, at age 13, been lucky to survive with a scar.
But the other night — on the same street, in the very block where a dozen years ago that gunshot nearly killed him — another shooter’s bullet did not miss. Burnett died. He was 25.
His death in the small hours of Feb. 22 at a weekend-night neighborhood gathering came amid a wave of violence in Middle Georgia’s largest city.
In a span of nine days earlier this month, seven people were killed. Three of them, Burnett included, were slain in a burst of gunfire at that wee-hours get-together.
In unrelated episodes, nine other people were wounded by gunfire in a 39-hour span on Feb. 21 and Feb. 22.
Homicides in Macon and Bibb County have been on a steady decline since reaching an all-time high of 71 killings in 2022. Forty people were slain in 2023; 39 in 2024; and 29 in 2025.
Officials cite a concerted effort, the Macon Violence Prevention program and initiatives to guide at-risk youths, as having broadly fostered the decline.
So the recent bloodshed — with 13 homicides this year as of Feb. 26 — has come as a blow in a county that consistently ranks as one of the state’s highest in per-capita violent crime.
In 2024, the year of the GBI’s most current available statistics for what it classifies as murders, only the counties of Fulton (176), DeKalb (152), Richmond (47) and Gwinnett (30) had more than Bibb (28).
As a result of the mid-February shootings here, Bibb Commissioner Stanley Stewart has in recent days proposed a late-night curfew aimed at people 17 and younger. But he admits that would go only so far. The county already has a similar measure for those under 16.
“I know this is not the magic end-all be-all, but it shows that we are offering more than just our prayers and condolences,” Stewart said.
On Tuesday, an impromptu meeting of a few dozen concerned citizens convened at a technical school half a mile or so across the Unionville community from where Burnett was killed.
They voiced support for those affected. One woman described the spate of violence as “disheartening.” Another called it “straight crazy.”
Some told of hoping to make a difference in the lives of those on troubled paths.
Later on, others delivered food to families of the victims, including Burnett’s kin at a house across town from the shooting scene.
The next evening, friends and relatives were still gathered at Burnett’s mother’s home on Macon’s east side. Some played basketball in the driveway. In the front yard, Burnett’s father stood smoking a cigarette.
He was asked about the improbable nature of his son’s death. How he had survived a shooting years earlier and now died near the same corner.
“It’s been puzzling me, too,” Charleston Burnett Jr. said. “It was on the same street. Same street.”
On a fall night in 2013, a gunman in a Cadillac in a gang-style drive-by had opened fire at Cedar and Moseley avenues.
The shooter missed the teenager he was aiming for, but his bullets struck two other youths. A 16-year-old girl fell dead. The other teen wounded was Burnett III, who was riding through, a passenger in his grandfather’s Ford pickup.
A few days afterward, Burnett III told a local television station, “I was really supposed to die that night. But God saved me.”
The boy said at the time that “somehow,” the bullet, which shattered the truck’s rear window and tore through a headrest, “went a different direction” and didn’t pierce his skull.
As an adult, Burnett III enjoyed riding dirt bikes and go-carts and playing cards and board games. He earned his GED certificate from Central Georgia Technical College. His dad said he was considering a career working on cars.
His brother, Za’lon Burnett, 14, said, “If he saw you struggling, he’d step in, help you out.”
One version of events is that the triple slaying early on Feb. 22 stemmed from an argument that escalated to gunfire. Investigators have since charged a 20-year-old man with three counts of murder.
Burnett’s father doesn’t think his son knew the gunman and said he wasn’t sure of the circumstances.
Burnett Jr. said he heard his son was “trying to defuse” things. “I really don’t know.”
The father had grown up in apartments near the scene, which lies roughly 2 miles southwest of downtown Macon in an impoverished section of the city that has long been plagued by gun violence.
Over the years, the area has also been buoyed by many who live there, taking strides to make life better.
In the spring of 2017, a neighborhood matriarch, Constance Parson, a former college mathematics instructor, died of natural causes at age 90 in the house where she’d been born.
Parson’s mother had in the 1950s been the first principal of the elementary school across the road.
Parson, in her later years, kept the tidiest yard on Pio Nono Avenue, one of Macon’s busiest streets.
Upon her death, when Parson hadn’t been heard from for a few days, it was Burnett III, who frequented the area, who noticed something amiss. He and friends alerted the authorities that Parson needed checking on.
He died less than a block from her back door.
“He wasn’t the type to mess with nobody,” his father said. “That’s the part that really gets you.”
About the Author
Joe Kovac Jr. is Macon bureau chief covering Middle Georgia for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
