A biracial man who says he was fending off a racist attack on a Georgia highway when he fired into a pickup truck and killed a teenage passenger has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
FILE - This undated photo provided by the Bulloch County Sheriff's Office shows Marc Wilson, of Sharpsburg, Ga. Wilson was charged with killing a 17-year-old girl in a highway shooting after opening fire from his car in self-defense after the pickup truck in which the girl was a passenger tried to force him off the road, a defense attorney told a jury as his murder trial opened on Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022.
Wilson's attorneys insisted during his August trial that he was justified to shoot in self-defense when the pickup truck's driver tried to run Wilson's car off the road during the summer of 2020. Prosecutors argued Wilson had no legal grounds for firing a handgun in traffic and could have escaped if he was being harassed by another driver.
Defense attorneys acknowledged that Wilson fired the shot that killed Hutcheson, of Reidsville, on a bypass circling the southeast Georgia city of Statesboro the night of June 24, 2020. One of the bullets he fired pierced the truck’s rear window and struck Hutcheson in the head. She died after her friends rushed her to a hospital.
Wilson — the son of a Black father and white mother — and his white girlfriend had just picked up food from a Taco Bell about 12:30 a.m. when the pickup truck pulled alongside Wilson’s much smaller Ford Focus. Wilson told police the pickup truck tried to run his car off the road as white teenagers inside yelled racist slurs.