14 Ga. App. 261 | Ga. Ct. App. | 1914
During the night of August 3, 1912, in the public road, near the house of Bud Harbin, in Hart county, Georgia, John Heaton was shot and killed, Henry Nixon firing the fatal shot, and Ellis Nixon being present. A sister of these Nixons was the wife of Heaton, and some time before the killing she left him and went with her infant to the home of her father, and for the time being was making it her home. There is evidence that the deceased was a man of violent character, which was aggravated when he was drinking, and on the night of the tragedy he was under the influence of liquor. He was at Beed Creek Church that night, and, about eleven o’clock, asked one Tom Thrasher, to go with him to Tom Nixon’s (his.father-in-law)'. Before that he went to his own home and told his daughter that if he did not get back inside of 35 or 40 minutes, she might know that he was killed or had killed somebody. When the deceased arrived at Tom Nixon’s, he raised a row with his mother-in-law and the other members of the family that were there. No male members of the family were at home at the time. He indulged in violent denunciation of his mother-in-law and the whole Nixon family, threatening to kill them all, and fired three shots over them into the house. His wife, through fright, grabbed her baby and fled in her nightclothes to a neighbor’s house, a distance of a mile. Mrs. Nixon, the mother-in-law.
We find no material error in any of the grounds of the motion for a new trial save the four that we have dealt with. It is true that some of the instructions complained of in other grounds are somewhat confusing and may be a little inapt in expression, but we do not think they require a reversal. Judgment reversed.