Monday marks the fourth anniversary of the tragic death of Jerry Lee Davis in Jesup.
On January 13, 2021, the husband and father was brutally murdered while laying in bed with his young daughter. His wife and other children were also home when two individuals stormed the house and shot Davis to death. At the time, Davis was employed as a delivery truck driver for McDaniel Supply Company, a commissary vendor that serves Smith SP and other correctional facilities.Â
The GBI office in Kingsland began investigating the case, but it would be months before an arrest would be made and the Davis case would be publicly linked to a January 30, 2021 murder across the river in Tattnall County and, later, a criminal enterprise operating from behind the walls of Smith State Prison.
In August 2021, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Region 5 Office announced the arrest of four individuals in connection to the murder of 88-year-old Bobby C. Kicklighter in Tattnall County, following up days later to announce that Christopher Reginald Sumlin, Jr. was also charged for the murder of Jerry Davis.
A criminal indictment in Tattnall County would later allege that Sumlin and Jessica Jean Gerling were responsible for Davis’ death. Sumlin was a former inmate at Smith State Prison and Gerling was a former corrections officer at Smith SP. She was terminated for attempting to bring contraband into the facility, though she was never formally charged by the Georgia Department of Corrections. Gerling was murdered in Long County roughly five months after Davis’ death.
Case Status
Though an arrest was made in Davis’ murder in 2021, the tangled web of connected crimes stemming from Smith SP has left the case unindicted in Wayne County ever since. Sumlin, who is being held in the Wayne County Jail, is facing the death penalty in Tattnall County for his alleged role in the death of Kicklighter.
The death penalty case will take precedence with alleged kingpin and Smith SP inmate Nathan Weekes being tried first. That trial is slated to begin in August 2025. Upon the conclusion of Weekes’ trial, prosecutors will move on to Sumlin’s death penalty case in Tattnall County and will then move on to resolve the Wayne County case, pending the outcome of the Tattnall case.
It can be a difficult pill to swallow for the loved ones of Davis who naturally want justice in Davis’ name, but prosecutors have opted to try the cases in this particular order in hopes of preserving the integrity of the case.
The alleged crimes of the criminal enterprise span four counties, two GBI regional offices, and two judicial circuits. To date, nine people have been arrested and charged for their respective roles in three murders and the tangential criminal operations relating to those murders, with more than a dozen others named in indictments and other court proceedings.
It will be years before the cases are resolved in their entirety, particularly due to the length of time the Georgia Department of Corrections and its staff facilitated the criminal operations.
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