BY DASH COLEMAN
Rashaad Spann’s cellphone rang Thursday afternoon.
Spann’s uncle, Anthony Bryan, pulled the slain basketball standout’s phone from his pocket and silenced it.
“Who was that?” Spann’s mother, Shanell Bryan, wanted to know.
“I dunno,” Anthony said. “I don’t ever answer.”
Shanell and Anthony had just been talking about Spann, whose life was cut short by a gunshot in the early hours of Feb. 14.
“A lot of people call his phone just to hear his voice mail,” Shanell said.
Spann, who would have turned 21 Monday, is one of 14 people who fell victim to a homicide in Chatham County in the first six months of this year.
Arrests have been made in half of those cases, including Spann’s. Detectives are working to solve the others, as well as ones dating years back.
“A homicide case never closes,” said Maj. Larry Branson, who runs the Savannah-Chatham police department’s Criminal Investigations Division. “And I really, really hate the term cold case. We don’t use it… We are reaching back to cases 10, 12 years ago… and further back as well.”
Homicides this year
All but one of the homicides this year occurred within the city limits of Savannah: Twelve were shooting deaths in the city and one, the June beating death of 34-year-old Lauren Brown Smart, was on Wilmington Island.
Additionally, the death of a Port Wentworth woman in January is being investigated as a homicide. Lisa Marie Pynn, 33, was found dead in the bedroom of her home early Jan. 18 by her young child. Port Wentworth police have not said how she died.
Metro police consider the shooting death of 11-year-old Montrez Burroughs by a 12-year-old playmate on the city’s westside a homicide, but the 12-year-old was charged with manslaughter, not murder. The incident occurred when the two young boys were handling a gun, police said.
Of the 13 other homicide cases in metro’s jurisdiction this year, police have made arrests in seven and also have closed four from 2013, Branson said.
Two teenagers have been shot to death in Savannah. One of those homicides, that of 15-year-old William Elijah Norman in January in Cuyler-Brownville, remains unsolved.
Norman “Jookie” Koonce was charged with murder and, as of Wednesday, indicted in the April death of 16-year-old Quahfee Murphy in a midtown home.
The cases closed from last year were the double shooting deaths of teenagers Dominique Bright and Syheem Spaulding, the Christmas Eve shooting death of Michael John Polite, and the August death of an infant in which the baby’s mother was charged.
“These cases can take days, weeks, months, years,” Branson said. “I don’t mean that to be a cliche, but you don’t know how long they’ll take — tens of years sometimes. And for the survivors of a homicide victim, some are able to understand what’s happened and make adjustments in their life and move forward. And then for some survivors, it never ends. Many things stop right there. We all want justice.”
Toll of a homicide
The Bryans know all too well the impact of a loved one being suddenly lost to violence.
“I can say that it really, really changes people’s lives,” Shanell said. “People don’t know how much it affects people’s lives, but it really does. And probably not just for the family (of the person) who was killed, but the other person’s also.
“Especially the people that haven’t found the killer — just sitting there wondering about it. It really affects them.”
A standout on the Groves and Jenkins high school basketball teams in his teens, Spann had returned to Savannah from Clinton College in Rock Hill, S.C., for the spring semester to undergo knee surgery and to work before going back to school in August.
He would usually stay with his mother or grandmother, and, as the oldest sibling, he would always pick up his brothers from school and take his sister to get something to eat afterward, Shanell said.
The last time she saw her son was late Feb. 13, about four hours before he was killed.
“About 10:30 that night, he brought us our Valentine’s cards and told my daughter to be ready the next day to take her to the movies,” Shanell said.
Police responding to a shooting call in Avondale about 2:15 a.m. Feb. 14 found Spann wounded in a car at the east end of Hawaii Avenue. He was taken to Memorial University Medical Center, where he died.
Detectives arrested another 20-year-old, Fashad Kennedy, the same day and charged him with murder. He was indicted by a grand jury in April.
Authorities have not released information about a motive for the slaying. Shanell said she does not know Kennedy.
More than 2,000 people attended Spann’s funeral, Anthony said.
Friends still call to check in.
“Probably four of them have called me today,” Shanell said. “They always call.”
Sometimes, it’s people who haven’t heard the news.
“A lot of coaches don’t know,” Anthony said. “They’re still calling.”
Sitting in their mother’s home in Woodville/Bartow on Thursday, the Bryans pointed out a basketball signed and given to them by the Jenkins team at halftime during a game they played the day of Spann’s funeral.
Shanell said Spann, who played for a Groves High team that reached the state quarterfinals and as a Jenkins player was named Region 3-AAAAA player of the year as a junior, had always wanted to play basketball.
Growing up, he’d play with his dad and cousins.
“He always played with people who were older than him,” Anthony said. “… And he’d go out and beat grown men.”
Though he always had a basketball nearby, Spann’s mom said he was quick to lend a hand to anyone around the neighborhood who might need help.
“He did everything for everybody,” Shanell said. “If he was eating, everybody around him was going to eat, you know?”
Public’s help key in solving cases
Twelve investigators and two sergeants are working homicides in metro’s violent crimes unit. The detectives, however, are also responsible for investigating aggravated assaults, suspicious deaths, infant deaths and suicides. But homicides, Branson said, take priority.
Branson said the first 48 hours are the most critical in any homicide investigation. A lead investigator is assigned but is backed up by others.
“We immediately begin our investigation at the scene and we’ll go 10, 12, 16 hours with a half-dozen or more investigators assigned to find out the who, what, when, where, how, why,” he said.
Sometimes, police need help from the public — information from people who may have seen or heard something.
“Sometimes we get many, many tips, and then sometimes we get no tips at all — no information at all comes in, and that’s tough,” Branson said.
Every year, he said, police get tips that help lead them to killers.
“CrimeStoppers is absolutely anonymous,” Branson said. “The police have no idea who’s calling. The CrimeStoppers receptionist has no idea who’s calling… We just need the information. You don’t have to tell us who you are. Just point us in the right direction. Give us some place to look because these guys are very good at being detectives, and they will look at every piece of that information that we get and dig deeper.”
Cases stay open
“We have homicide stats going back 25 years or more,” Branson said. “So we will go back and pull cases and work it with a fresh pair of eyes. There are several cases where family members have stayed in touch with us and they want to know, ‘What have you done? What is the latest on this case?’”
Generally, that’s not something detectives can go into.
“Family members do sometimes get quite frustrated because they don’t hear from the investigator or we can’t talk about the details of the case,” Branson said. “That’s because we don’t want to release any information that’s going to jeopardize the eventual prosecution of a murder... We don’t want to contaminate in any way the purity of the investigation.”
The detectives who work homicide understand why family members of victims have questions, he said, and they’re sympathetic to that even though it’s against policy to discuss details with anyone outside the investigation.
“When someone is murdered, they’re gone — immediately, they’re gone,” Branson said. “And it’s very hard to adjust to that loss.”
How each person reacts to a loved one being killed is different, Branson said.
“For the survivors of a homicide victim, some people are able to understand what’s happened and to make adjustments to their life and move forward, and then for some survivors, it never ends,” Branson said. “Many things stop right there. We all want justice. So it’s very, very painful for all the survivors, but for some it just seems that it’s continually at the forefront.”
It’s not easy on the detectives either, Branson said.
“You think about these homicide investigators — they see and experience more in their lifetime, more in their career, than anyone should ever have to see or experience,” he said. “And a big part of being a homicide investigator is how do you process the death? How do you process the dissecting of a human body in an autopsy? How do you process working with the family through the most horrific crime imaginable?”
He said it takes a lot of inner strength.
“There are investigators who have a very strong faith,” Branson said. “There are investigators who have certainly a lot of self-fortitude. There are investigators who ... simply thrive on solving these crimes and doing the best they can to make sure that justice is done.
“It’s the satisfaction of seeing justice done.”
Keeping a name alive
The man charged with murdering Spann sits in jail awaiting trial.
Spann’s mother said that doesn’t make her feel much better.
“It’s not easier,” Shanell said. “It’s probably the same thing, because I can’t imagine it being any harder for me.”
She said no one in the family has been coping with Spann’s death well.
“It was hard,” she said. “Everybody has had to adjust their lives drastically.”
Yet they managed to start a foundation in Spann’s name to help at-risk youth. The pieces began to fall into place a week after his death.
“We just got together and we had a meeting, and we just said we want the violence to stop and to help youth,” Shanell said.
The Rashaad Spann Foundation has held a basketball camp, an Easter event that involved buying clothing for less fortunate girls and working with Habitat for Humanity, the Bryans said. And it’s already begun awarding a Savannah-area high school junior basketball player of the year honor.
On Saturday, the foundation will hold a birthday bash basketball tournament for Spann at Charlie “Sad” Bryan Park.
Basketball, of course, is integral to the foundation’s mission. Shanell said she remembers the little kid who won a letter-writing contest to a local radio station to score tickets to the Harlem Globetrotters when they came through town — the one who took the basketball they gave him home and kept it in bed for three nights.
“That’s all he wanted to do, always,” Shanell said. “Probably when he was 10 or 11, he would always be talking, and I would say, ‘Who are you talking to?’ And he would say, ‘I’m talking to the Duke coach. He was just talking to the university coach, his own team.
“So even when he was a child, he knew he was going to be something. He kept saying he was going to be a basketball player, a basketball star.”
MAKE THE CALL
Police ask that anyone with information that can help them solve homicide cases in Chatham County call CrimeStoppers at 912-234-2020. Tipsters remain anonymous and may qualify for a cash reward. Information can also be sent via text to CRIMES (274637) using the keyword CSTOP2020 before the message content.
Metro’s investigators can be reached confidentially at 912-525-3124.
CHATHAM COUNTY HOMICIDES IN 2014
• Jan. 15: Randy Brown, 39, was shot on the 1000 block of East 34th Street just after 2 a.m. and later died at Memorial University Medical Center. Lashannon Jabar Green, 35, was arrested and charged with murder in Brown’s death.
• Jan. 17: Marvin Hills, 24, was found suffering from a gunshot wound in a stopped car on the 270 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard about 3:11 a.m. He later died at Memorial.
• Jan. 18: Lisa Marie Pynn, 33, was found dead in the bedroom of her Port Wentworth home by her 6-year-old child. After an autopsy, police announced they’d launched a homicide investigation but have not released the cause of death.
• Jan. 22: William Elijah Norman, 15, was found shot to death in front of a house on the 900 block of West Victory Drive about 7:30 a.m. Police say he did not live nearby.
• Feb. 14: Rashaad Spann, 20, was found wounded in a car near the east end of Hawaii Avenue after being shot about 2:14 a.m. He later died at Memorial. Fashad Kennedy, 20, was arrested and charged with murder in Spann’s death.
• March 9: Michael Bruce Hall, 52, was found critically injured by a gunshot wound in front of his house on the first block of West 61st Street about 10 p.m. He later died at Memorial.
• March 17: Barry Trevon Williams, 24, was one of two men found lying on the ground on the 2000 block of Mississippi Avenue suffering from gunshot wounds about 7:24 p.m. He died on scene. James Harris Jr., 28, was charged with murder in Williams’ death as well as aggravated assault for the shooting of the other man.
• April 8: Michael Willard James was found shot to death in his SUV after it crashed into a car parked in the yard of a house on the 600 block of West 58th Street just after midnight. Jerome Coast Jr., 31, was charged with murder in James’ death.
• April 20: Malcolm Xavier Raphael Mitchell, 21, was driving a car at Waters Avenue and East 38th Street about 12:48 p.m. when shots were fired at him from a passing vehicle. Mitchell crashed into a yard and was found in the street. He later died at Memorial.
• April 26: Quahfee Murphy, 16 was shot to death at a residence on the 3800 block of Bull Street about 9 p.m. A 23-year-old man was also shot but survived. Norman “Jookie” Koonce Jr., 27, was charged with murder and aggravated assault for the double shooting.
• June 7: Lauren Brown Smart, 34, was found unresponsive in her Walthour Road home about 9 a.m. after her husband reported she wasn’t breathing. Her husband, Norman Smart, 37, was charged with murder and aggravated assault (domestic violence) in her death.
• June 8: Terrance Felder, 48, was found shot on the 1100 block of East 42nd Street about 8:10 p.m. He later died at Memorial.
• June 13: Michael Jerome Allen, 52, was shot shortly after 2 p.m. June 11 near the intersection of East Lathrop Avenue and Damon Street. He died at Memorial two days later. Phell “Lucky” Hudson, 54, was charged with murder in Allen’s death.
• June 14: Travis Rose, 31, was shot at Madison Apartments on the city’s westside late at night. He later died at Memorial.
RASHAAD SPANN FOUNDATION
To learn more about the Rashaad Spann Foundation, go to www.flyhighbabyboy.com.
A “Stop The Violence” birthday bash and basketball tournament in Spann’s name is planned for Saturday afternoon in Charlie “Sad” Bryan Park.
ON THE WEB
Go to savannahnow.com to see a timeline of the homicides that have occurred in Chatham County this year.
