Inset: Tavarus Toliver (Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office). Background: A Motel 6 where the shooting occurred in Columbus, Ga. (Google Maps).
A Georgia man is behind bars after shooting and killing another man who intervened in a dispute to protect the woman he loved, according to Peach State law enforcement and witnesses at the scene.
Tavarus Toliver, 24, stands accused of one count each of murder and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime, according to a press release issued by the Columbus Police Department.
The underlying incident occurred Wednesday, Sept. 16, outside a Motel 6 on Victory Drive in Columbus and took the life of 34-year-old Jonathan Tennie, police said.
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Police arrived just before 5 p.m. that day, in response to a shooting and found the victim suffering from a gunshot wound.
Paramedics rushed Tennie to Piedmont Columbus Regional, where he died, according to a report by Columbus-based ABC affiliate WTVM.
While law enforcement has largely kept mum, the TV station spoke to witnesses who described the violence from that day.
Tennie’s fiancee told a WTVM reporter who arrived on the scene that a verbal altercation eventually led to the fatal shooting.
The woman said the defendant was known to the group because he was her sister’s boyfriend. The argument began, the witness said, when Tennie objected to how Toliver was speaking to the women.
“He doesn’t like women being disrespected in any kind of manner,” she said. “Verbally, physically, anything. So he speaks out on it.”
At some point, the witness said she managed to calm her fiance down. But the defendant allegedly kept arguing. Eventually, Toliver pulled out a gun and fired, the woman told the TV station.
“He saved me,” the distraught fiancee went on in comments to WTVM. “I’m here because he’s not. Over a family quarrel.”
The woman went on to remember the man she lost in fond terms — and said he rose to meet the adversity they recently faced.
“We had just lost our home,” the fiancee continued. “That’s why we’ve been living in hotels. We were living in our car. And he had every option to go and stay with family, but he chose to stay with me so I didn’t have to go through it alone.”
The woman added that Tennie was a family man who treated her kin like his own even though they had yet to marry.
“He loved my nephews fiercely,” she said. “He was their favorite uncle in the world.”
Toliver is currently detained in the Muscogee County Jail on no bond. He appeared in court on Friday for a bond hearing.
The post ‘He saved me’: Man shot and killed defending fiancee during altercation over ‘women being disrespected,’ witness says first appeared on Law & Crime.
