BEAUFORT, S.C. (March 26, 2026) – A 20-year-old Atlanta resident who shot and killed the Bluffton man who was giving him and his girlfriend a place to stay has been sent to prison.
A Beaufort County General Sessions jury found Jeremiah Theodore McGee-Ashton guilty of voluntary manslaughter Thursday in the 2022 death of 57-year-old Mark Tony Haynes. McGee-Ashton was also found guilty of possession of weapon during commission of a violent crime. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
“Tony Haynes showed charity in taking two people in need into his home,” said Deputy Solicitor Mary Jones of the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, who prosecuted the case. “The defendant repaid this charity with ingratitude, then with violent fury when Mr. Haynes decided he had had enough and asked them to leave.
“In the most tragic way thinkable, what followed proved Mr. Haynes was justified in wanting the defendant out of his house. There was no reason for him to have died that night.”
Jeremiah McGee-Ashton
At about 8:30 p.m. Oct. 18, 2022, the Bluffton Police Department was called to a residence on Buck Island Road, where McGee-Ashton and his 16-year-old girlfriend were staying with the former boyfriend of McGee-Ashton’s mother. Authorities found Haynes suffering from three gunshot wounds. He was taken to a hospital in Savannah, where he died from his injuries.
McGee-Ashton fled to a nearby house on Buck Island Road shortly after the shooting. He turned himself in about five hours after the killing, wearing different clothes than at the time of the attack.
McGee-Ashton told authorities that two months before the shooting, he had been living with his father in Atlanta, who brought him to Bluffton after getting a job in New York and being unable to take his son with him. McGee-Ashton and his juvenile girlfriend were left with Haynes, although he was no longer in a relationship with McGee-Ashton’s mother, who lived a short distance away on Buck Island Road.
Witnesses told investigators that during the two months before Haynes’ killing, neither McGee-Ashton nor his girlfriend worked or contributed to the upkeep of the home. Haynes took McGee-Ashton to his job as a landscaper and tried to get him work there. When Haynes confronted McGee-Ashton about being lazy and looking at his phone instead of working, McGee-Ashton raised his shirt to show Haynes a handgun tucked into his waistband.
Witnesses encouraged Haynes to remove McGee-Ashton from the home, and he attempted to do so on the night of the shooting. When he came home to find the defendant and his girlfriend on the couch playing video games on their phones, he ordered the couple to leave and began setting their belongings outside the house.
An argument ensued when Haynes unplugged extension cord that was charging the phones of McGee-Ashton and his girlfriend. McGee-Ashton told investigators Haynes was shot when the gun discharged during a tussle over McGee-Ashton’s firearm but claimed his finger was never on the gun’s trigger.
Evidence contradicted McGee-Ashton’s account. Haynes was shot three times — once in the leg and twice in the chest. McGee-Ashton grabbed the gun, his phone and its charger, then fled to a neighbor’s home.
McGee-Ashton also told investigators the gun fell out of his pants along the way to the neighbors house and that he didn’t know where it was. However, a resident turned over the firearms to police after finding it under a boat on the property where McGee-Ashton fled. It had been disassembled and was missing its barrel, preventing authorities from matching it to projectiles recovered from the scene and Haynes’ body. However, the gun was matched to shell casings found at the residence. McGee-Ashton’s DNA was detected on the gun’s trigger.
Jones called 12 witnesses during two days of testimony at the Beaufort County Courthouse.
Circuit Court Judge Marvin Dukes handed down the sentence.
Jones is a member of the Career Criminal Unit, which prosecutes the circuit’s most violent and habitual offenders. That team has earned convictions against 544 of the 597 defendants it has prosecuted since its inception in 2009.
