MACON — A suspect sought in the killing of a sleeping homeless man stalked his victim for almost two hours in the midnight shadows of a downtown alley here. Then, the assailant knelt, bowed his head and clasped his hands, as if in prayer, before using a cinder block to repeatedly bludgeon the resting man.
Remarkably clear security-camera footage of the attack and its ritualistic prelude — which investigators allowed The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to view in order to convey to the public its troubling nature — reveals disturbing details that have not previously been divulged.
The still-at-large suspect appears to have struck without provocation in the wee hours of May 24, half a block from City Hall. Investigators are alerting police across the Southeast and beyond about the brutal crime as they try to determine if similar cases exist. They also want the public to take a closer look at the video stills.
“What we really want people to know is, we realize how heinous this crime is, and we want to get (the suspect’s) image out there (again),” Bibb County sheriff’s investigator Lee Rohrbach said.
Color images of the suspect that show well-defined views of his face have been widely circulated in Middle Georgia in the wake of the killing. But the photos have yet to help identify him. That strongly suggests he hails from elsewhere and that he may be transient.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Because the episode was caught on camera, investigators have been able to study the suspect’s behavior, before and after the confounding attack. There is no known motive. The man didn’t appear to take any of the victim’s belongings. If not for the footage, the death of Albert Kenneth Knight Jr., who was well-known and liked, may have been chalked up to a fight.
“It’s hard to explain how bad this is,” Rohrbach said.
Knight, who was 59, has been described by the director of homeless outreach center here as “a gentle soul” who wasn’t known as a troublemaker. According to published accounts, his family has said he had a “yearslong drug addiction” and that he lived on the streets for decades. He was, at the time of his death, in the process of securing permanent housing.
Credit: Bibb County Sheriff's Office
Credit: Bibb County Sheriff's Office
A preliminary incident report of Knight’s slaying mistakenly noted that the fatal attack began the night of May 24, the Friday before the start of the Memorial Day weekend. But it actually occurred hours earlier.
Knight would lay dead for more than 50 hours before anyone realized he had been killed. Because of how he was positioned, with his face covered, he may have looked like he was asleep.
For hours after the attack, the suspect, wearing gloves, wandered downtown Macon and at one point rode on a city bus. Investigators have tracked his movements using footage from a network of surveillance cameras.
At one point, the suspect donned a hardhat as he strolled sidewalks. He wore glasses throughout and wore a mint-green shirt that bore the insignia of the Hilton Head Island Bike Shop.
Macon straddles the junction of I-75 and I-16. While on his travels in downtown, the suspect asked at least one person where the interstate was. While talking to one of the people he encountered — a person who investigators later tracked down — the suspect mentioned Savannah.
“I think we are dealing with someone who is familiar with Macon, but not from Macon,” Rohrbach said. “This is just kind of my opinion of what I’ve seen how he walks around. … It does appear at some points that he is lost.”
Credit: Courtesy photo
Credit: Courtesy photo
The suspect was last seen on surveillance cameras at about 10:30 a.m. on May 24, more than five hours after the attack. He was walking toward downtown’s lower end.
Investigators have been in touch with police across the region and outside Georgia, so far to no avail. Facial-recognition software has turned up no definitive leads as to who the suspect might be.
Gary Rothwell, a former GBI agent, was once a consultant for Clearview AI, one of the companies that assists law enforcement authorities in scouring billions of online images to identify suspects. Rothwell said the image that investigators have of the wanted man may not be clear enough to turn up a match.
“Or it may be searchable but it’s just pulling in so many possibilities,” Rothwell said. “And the person that you’re searching for may just not have an image that’s been entered on the internet.”
The suspect’s first known appearance in the city, at least his whereabouts that can be tracked by cameras, came at 2:53 a.m. on May 24. He was standing near St. Joseph Catholic Church. The parish sits a block from City Hall, about 300 yards uphill from the alley where Knight bedded down.
Investigators believe the suspect may have been on the prowl.
In footage viewed by the AJC, the sight of Knight stretched out on the ground on a patio-like platform in the alley behind the shuttered Crazy Bull nightclub more or less stopped the suspect in his tracks. It was 3:02 a.m. Private security cameras on a rear wall of that defunct establishment recorded the killing. The cameras were perfectly positioned. The man never seemed to notice them.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Knight was stretched out near a side door, with his head cloaked in a dark hoodie, likely to keep light in the illuminated alley out of his eyes. Though he stirred from sleep several times, the video showed, he seemed to have never noticed the man watching him.
The suspect spent much of the next two hours observing Knight, at times standing over him, staring then pacing.
Knight was said to have been sleeping there off and on for a couple of weeks. There is no indication he knew his attacker or ever crossed paths with him.
The suspect at times seemed to be in search of something.
Eventually he lugged a roughly 35-pound cinder block into the alley, which links the well-traveled Poplar and Cherry streets.
“A weapon of opportunity,” investigator Rohrbach called it.
At various times in the minutes before the attack, the suspect can be seen placing the cinder block at different locations in the vicinity of where Knight lay, positioning it in and out of the shadows. For a time, the suspect stood mere feet from Knight, clutching the concrete brick.
Knight rolled over at one point, and the suspect backed off and waited some more.
At about 4:50 a.m., in the spotlight of a beaming security lamp, he knelt over the block and appeared to pray.
At 4:58 a.m., he attacked.
Credit: Bibb County Sheriff's Office
Credit: Bibb County Sheriff's Office
After hitting Knight in the head with the cinder block, the suspect dropped his weapon and scurried away, the video showed. But not far, maybe 25 feet. When he looked back and noticed Knight still moving, he grabbed the block again and delivered more blows. He would return yet again and strike Knight twice.
Then, the man gathered the things he had been carrying, including a tote pack, and seemed poised to leave.
Investigators believe the suspect sensed Knight wasn’t dead. Because the killer dropped his gear and dashed back to the wounded man. The suspect struck him in the head half a dozen more times. Then he left.
“You’re almost at a loss for words … to describe what this guy did,” Rohrbach said. “It is horrific.”
Of the suspect and whether his behavior seems to portray someone who may have violently lashed out before, Rohrbach said, “I don’t think it’s his first time.”
“He may,” the investigator speculated, “have attacked somebody before but not killed them.”
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