Sha'von Patterson with a photograph of him and his brother, Justin, who was shot and killed by Norman Neesmith on Jan. 29, 2011.
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: April 25, 2012
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Gillian Laub for The New York Times
Mr. Neesmith's home in Lyons, Ga., where the shooting took place. He fired four shots, and Justin Patterson died in his yard.
He grabbed the .22-caliber pistol he kept next to his bed and went to investigate. He found two young brothers who had been secretly invited to party with an 18-year-old relative he had raised like a daughter and her younger friend. The young people were paired up in separate bedrooms. There was marijuana and sex.
Over the course of the next confusing minutes on a January morning in 2011, there would be a struggle. The young men would make a terrified run for the door. Mr. Neesmith, who is 62 and white, fired four shots. One of them hit Justin Patterson, who was 22 and black.
The bullet pierced his side, and he died in Mr. Neesmith's yard. His younger brother, Sha'von, then 18, ran through the onion fields in the dark, frantically trying to call his mother.
On that day, Jan. 29, 2011, Mr. Neesmith was arrested. The district attorney brought seven charges against him, among them murder, false imprisonment and aggravated assault. On Thursday, Mr. Neesmith is expected to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct, which might bring a year in a special detention program that requires no time behind bars.
Over the past several weeks, the men's parents, Deede and Julius Patterson, watched news of Trayvon Martin's death in Florida and focused on the similarities. In both cases, an unarmed young black man died at the hands of someone of a different race.
And they began to wonder why no one was marching for their son, why people like the Rev. Al Sharpton had not booked a ticket to Toombs County. The local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. has not even gotten involved, although Mr. Patterson's father approached them.
"We are looking into the case," said Michael Dennard, the president of the chapter, after a reporter called more than a year after the crime. He would not say more.
Why some cases with perceived racial implications catch the national consciousness and others do not is as much about the combined power of social and traditional media as it is about happenstance, said Ta-Nehisi Coates , a senior editor at The Atlantic who writes about racial issues.
Several events coalesced to push the Martin case forward: an apparently incomplete police investigation, no immediate arrest and Florida's expansive self-defense law.
"These stories happen all the time," Mr. Coates said. "It's heartbreaking and tragic, but there's not much news coverage unless the circumstances are truly, truly unusual."
"Stories like the south Georgia killing don't have the same particulars," he said. "One of the great tragedies is that people get shot under questionable circumstances in this country all the time."
Although the facts surrounding the case in Florida and the case in Georgia are quite different, both involve a claim of legally sanctioned self-defense, a dead young black man and, for the Pattersons and the Martins, deep concern that race played a role in the deaths of their sons.
"I definitely believe racism is why he was shot," said Mrs. Patterson, who recently left her job as director of operations at a uniform company and moved to another small Georgia town. "And for him to get nothing but a slap on the wrist? There is something wrong here."
That race played a significant part is not hard to imagine here in a county that was named after Robert Toombs, a general and one of the organizers of the Confederate government. A black woman has never been named Miss Vidalia Onion in the annual festival that begins Thursday. And until last year in neighboring Montgomery County, there were two proms — one for whites and one for blacks.
Still, like so many other crimes where race might be a factor, this one is not so clear-cut. Mr. Neesmith says he felt threatened. He says he aches for the parents but believes none of this would have happened if the young men had not been in his house when they should not have been.
"I think about it every day. It's the worst thing I've ever been through," Mr. Neesmith said as he stood in the doorway of his home. "In two minutes it just went bad. If you ain't never shot nobody, you don't want to do it, I'm telling you."
In the backyard, a pool was ready for neighborhood kids — both black and white — who he said loved to come over after school for a swim. Mr. Neesmith, a former school bus driver, and his late wife had been foster parents to dozens of children.
They took in a great-niece, who has a black parent, when she was a baby. She is now 19 and admitted to investigators that she invited Justin Patterson to their trailer home that night, timing it so Mr. Neesmith would be asleep. The two had been flirting on Facebook and in texts.
When Mr. Neesmith pulled the young men out of the bedrooms, he threatened to call the younger girl's grandfather, according to court documents and interviews. He asked the two, who both have young daughters, why they were not home with their children. He ranted and waved the gun around.
So the brothers made a run for it. By all accounts, while the younger one struggled to unlock a side door, the older one shoved Mr. Neesmith.
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Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, and Gillian Laub from Lyons.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 30, 2012
An article on Thursday about the shooting death of an unarmed young black man in Georgia gave an unofficial height from the Toombs County Sherriff's Office for Norman Neesmith, who killed the young man. While the authorities said Mr. Neesmith is 6-foot-2, that was the height he gave them. As a height chart in an accompanying picture taken during his booking showed, he is closer to 5-foot-11.
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