In shooting’s wake, with 5 players wounded, Northeast High rallies to win

MACON — As he stood on a ramp leading to the bleachers at a largely empty football stadium in the moments before kickoff here Thursday evening, Shanterrian Moss sensed his community’s pain.

There remained an air of disbelief about what happened across town in the small hours of Sunday morning.

A dozen people between the ages of 17 and 19 had been shot. Five of them were Northeast High School football players. Seven other teens also survived the bloodshed. Somehow, nobody died.

The episode itself was shocking enough — more than 30 thunderous seconds of sustained, automatic and semiautomatic gunfire. The fusillade erupted at an impromptu 18th birthday celebration for a female student. How no one was killed as scores of bullets sailed seemed improbable, a miracle even, to the police.

Moss, 48, a former Marine and Northeast alum, had come to the stadium at the Ed DeFore Sports Complex on this Middle Georgia city’s west side to support his school and to salute the wounded players. Four were in attendance. One of them, his cousin, was not. None of the five played Thursday.

Moss, his voice low as other spectators recited the pregame Pledge of Allegiance, said that in this city of nearly 160,000, the midnight violence in a park named for the woman who founded Macon’s famed Cherry Blossom Festival had left many shaking their heads.

“Trying to figure stuff out,” Moss said, his voice hushed. “It’s a sad thing when it comes to the kids.”

He said, “Everybody is supporting the players. Everybody has come together.”

Names of the victims have not been divulged, and while Moss spoke by name of his cousin, who he said remained in a hospital, he asked that the boy not be identified.

“He’s making a comeback,” Moss said. “He’s moving pretty good.”

Making sense of the midnight episode in that city park outside the front gates of historic Luther Williams Field has been a struggle even for investigators.

Bibb County sheriff’s officials have yet to say whether they know what prompted the shootout. At a Sunday afternoon news conference, they mistakenly stated the number of football players wounded as three.

Northeast supporter Shandrea Wilder, a registered nurse whose daughter is a Raiders cheerleader and whose husband, Benjamin, is an assistant coach, said recent days had been painful, hard to comprehend.

“It’s something that you never could imagine,” Wilder, 41, said as she headed to a concession stand before the game. “How could this even happen?”

She described how her husband had awakened Sunday morning to find on his phone dozens of late-night calls and texts he missed in the aftermath of the predawn chaos. Wilder said that at one point her husband sat on their porch and cried.

“He didn’t know what was going on,” she said.

As of Friday, five males from 15 to 24 years old had been jailed on charges in connection with the shooting.

Northeast entered Thursday’s game against county foe Rutland High School with a 4-1 record and a No. 5 ranking in Class 3A.

The Raiders looked listless in the early going.

They trailed the two-win Hurricanes for much of the first half before reeling off 52 unanswered points and pulling away for a 59-19 win.

After the game, Northeast coach Jeremy Wiggins bowed his head as his team knelt in prayer, which he concluded by saying, “We’re gonna get through this, Lord, and give you all the praise and glory.”

Wiggins later told reporters that his team spent the week trying to stay “focused on football.”