Deadly Bluffton eviction: Man convicted in 2022 killing of 57-year-old dad
An Atlanta man was found guilty in the shooting death of a man who let the defendant and his girlfriend stay at his Bluffton home in fall 2022.
Jeremiah Theodore McGee-Ashton, 20, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and a felony firearms charge in the killing of 57-year-old Bluffton man Mark Tony Haynes, who had previously dated the defendant’s mother. Prosecutors said Haynes was trying to evict McGee-Ashton when the two got into a fight that turned fatal.
McGee-Ashton was sentenced to 15 years in prison after a Beaufort County jury found him guilty on Thursday. He was initially charged with murder at the time of his arrest, according to previous reporting.
About two months before the shooting, Haynes had let the defendant and his 16-year-old girlfriend stay at his home on Buck Island Road, although Haynes was no longer in a relationship with McGee-Ashton’s mother. McGee-Ashton, who was 17 at the time, had been living with his father in Atlanta but was unable to relocate with him after his father got a job in New York, according to a press release from the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office.
“Tony Haynes showed charity in taking two people in need into his home,” Deputy Solicitor Mary Jones, who prosecuted the case, wrote in the press release. “The defendant repaid this charity with ingratitude, then with violent fury when Mr. Haynes decided he had had enough and asked them to leave.”
Haynes, a father of two, grew up in Beaufort County and had a passion for cooking, according to his obituary. After graduating from H.E. McCracken High School in 1983, he worked as a chef at Hilton Head Island’s Palmetto Hall country club and several other businesses before pivoting to landscaping.
An eviction turns deadly
Neither McGee-Ashton nor his girlfriend were employed or contributed to the upkeep of the home during their stay, witnesses told investigators. When Haynes took McGee-Ashton to Haynes’ landscaping job and later confronted the teen about looking at his phone instead of working, McGee-Ashton raised his shirt to flash the handgun in his waistband, prosecutors said.
On Oct. 18, 2022, the night of the shooting, Haynes had decided to evict McGee-Ashton and his girlfriend from his house. Coming home to find the couple playing on their phones, the release says, he ordered them to leave and began taking their belongings outside.
Haynes then unplugged an extension cord that was charging the couple’s phones, leading to an argument with McGee-Ashton that ended in Haynes being shot three times: once in the leg and twice in the chest, prosecutors said.
McGee-Ashton grabbed his gun, phone and charger and fled to a nearby home. Haynes was taken to Savannah’s Memorial Health University Medical Center and was pronounced dead that night, according to previous reporting.
The defendant told investigators the handgun had fired during a “tussle” with Haynes over the firearm, although prosecutors said McGee-Ashton’s DNA was found on the trigger. A resident found the gun disassembled under a boat on the property where McGee-Ashton had fled, according to the solicitor’s office press release, despite the gunman telling police he didn’t know where the firearm was after it fell out of his pants.
Circuit Court Judge Marvin Dukes handed down the sentence Thursday in the Beaufort County Courthouse.
McGee-Ashton received credit for 272 days already spent in the Beaufort County Detention Center, according to court records. He bailed out in July 2023 on surety bonds totaling $75,000 and was required to undergo house arrest with GPS monitoring at his uncle’s residence in Augusta, Georgia.
