Gwinnett County prosecutors scored another victory Wednesday against a home-invasion crew that killed a Gwinnett drug dealer’s 15-year-old son, who was also an honor student and football player.
A jury convicted crew member Michael Earl Davis, 26, of murder, robbery and related charges, Dan Mayfield, the chief deputy prosecutor, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Davis is the next-to-the-last of the defendants in the case that exposed a suburban drug trafficker whose activities indirectly led to the death of his son.
Instead after they entered the house’s basement they confronted Jackson’s teenage son, Nicholas Jackson II, who was playing video games in his bedroom.
Friends and family describe the elder Jackson as a typical suburban dad, shuttling his son from their tan, two-story Norcross home to football games and volunteering at them.
However, federal prosecutors say Jackson was a drug dealer whose reputation on the street put his family in jeopardy.
In 2013, murder charges were dropped against Johnson, the then 35-year-old driver, after he agreed to testify against the other six members of a crew, including Jason Dozier who was convicted in 2013.
Johnson — who received a 15-year prison sentence in exchange for his testimony — did not go into the home but testified that then 37-year-old Dozier admitted firing shots into teen’s bedroom door along with co-defendant Anthony Lumpkin. Also charged in the case were Rico Dehaven West, Eddie Lewis Green and Darrez Lamontz Chandler.
Dozier was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In May, West received the same sentence after a jury found him guilty.In November, 2013, Green, 45, and Lumpkin were found guilty of murder and robbery and sentenced to life in prison and life without parole respectively.
The 33-year-old Chandler, who was paroled in 2006 after serving 21 months of a five-year sentence for aggravated assault, has not yet gone to trial on the murder charges. Davis’s sentencing date has not yet been set, Mayfield said.
Last May, Davis was on trial with West when a charge of jury tampering investigation against West momentarily stopped the trial and the judge severed Davis from the case to be tried at a later date, according to the Gwinnett Daily Post.
Nick Jackson Sr. testified at Dozier’s 2013 trial that he had sold drugs “off and on” for 15 years and resumed dealing cocaine when the real-estate market tanked in 2008. In a good week, he testified he’d distribute more than 40 pounds of the drug.
His family was unaware he sold drugs, Jackson Sr. said.
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