The man who was killed Friday evening when gunmen tried to steal his fiancee’s car outside a Walmart in west Macon had tried to defend himself with a knife.
Details of the fatal confrontation emerged Monday in a Bibb County sheriff’s report that shed at least some new light on the slaying.
The episode that cost Ronnie Joe Albea his life in a parking lot at the Harrison Road store shortly after 8 p.m. Friday unfolded as Albea and the woman he was engaged to, Misty Cox, 39, were about to place the groceries they’d just bought into the trunk of Cox’s car.
The sheriff’s report, a copy of which was obtained by The Telegraph, said that eyewitnesses told deputies that two young men, one “slim” and one “heavy-set,” got out of a black Volkswagen Passat. They approached the couple and “demanded keys to Cox’s vehicle,” the report said.
It was then that Albea “pulled a knife to defend himself” and was shot by the heavy-set man, the report said.
The first deputy on the scene, who had been on nearby Chambers Road when the shooting happened, mentioned in the report that in an effort to save Albea’s life he “performed chest compressions” until medics arrived.
The write-up noted that footage from security cameras showed that the bandits fled before the deputy got there, but not before the gunmen collected bullet shell casings from the shot or shots that were fired at Albea.
Sheriff David Davis on Monday was tight-lipped about the investigation into Albea’s death, which the sheriff deemed “a tragic situation.”
According to his Facebook page, Albea, an Augusta native, had done maintenance work in Baldwin County for the Milledgeville Housing Authority.
His slaying was Macon’s 43rd of 2022.
The county’s violent-death toll is on a troubling pace.
Last year, when a record 54 people died as a result of homicides, the 43rd victim was killed on Oct. 12.
