Georgia · Dougherty County · Crime & Courts

Albany, GA Shooting on East Oglethorpe Boulevard Kills Jamar Phillips, 17; Second Man Hospitalized at Phoebe Putney

A 17-year-old was shot dead and a second man was hospitalized after gunfire in the 200 block of East Oglethorpe Boulevard in Albany early Thursday. The Albany Police Department identified the teenager as Jamar Phillips and said investigators traced the gunshot to a struggle inside a vehicle. The case is still open.

By Kate Thompson Published Aug. 27, 2026, 12:55 p.m. ET 9 min read 1 dead

What happened on East Oglethorpe Boulevard in Albany?

A shooting in the middle of the night killed a teenager and left a second man wounded in Albany, the Albany Police Department said.

Officers reached the 200 block of East Oglethorpe Boulevard at about 2:45 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026, sent there by reports of gunfire, APD said in an account carried by WALB.

They found a teenage boy in a parking lot close by. He was dead of a gunshot wound, and the department identified him as Jamar Phillips, who was 17.

A second male reported his own gunshot wound to dispatchers a short time later. He was carried to Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, where his condition was stable.

The department said the case is still open.

Where in Albany did the shooting happen?

East Oglethorpe Boulevard is one of the through routes across Albany, the seat of Dougherty County in southwest Georgia.

The block APD named runs at street numbers in the 200s, and the parking lot where Phillips was found sits near it rather than on it.

Albany sits on the Flint River in southwest Georgia, and East Oglethorpe Boulevard carries traffic across the eastern side of the city.

Dougherty County is a single-city county in practical terms. Albany holds nearly all of its population, its courthouse and its jail, and the Albany Police Department covers the city while the sheriff’s office covers the ground outside it.

That matters for a case like this one only in that it fixes which agency owns the file. A shooting inside the city limits is APD’s to investigate from the first call to the last report.

Who was killed?

Jamar Phillips, 17. The Albany Police Department released his name and his age.

He was found outside, in a parking lot near the block officers had been sent to, with a single gunshot wound described by the department.

He is the only person known to have died in the incident.

What happened to the second person who was shot?

He called in himself. APD said a second male got in touch with dispatchers after the first response and told them that he, too, had been shot.

He was moved to Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany. The department described his condition there as stable.

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What did investigators determine about the vehicle?

APD investigators concluded that Phillips was inside a vehicle alongside one other person when a struggle began over two things at once: the vehicle and a firearm.

The gunshot came during that struggle, and it came while Phillips was still in the vehicle, the department said.

He fell from the vehicle afterward. That sequence is what puts him in a parking lot rather than in a car when officers arrived.

Two things follow from that account. The gun was in play between two people at close quarters, and the vehicle itself was part of what they were struggling over.

What happened to the vehicle officers pursued?

It has been ruled out.

Police said early on that officers had seen a vehicle pulling away from the area, that its driver did not stop when officers moved to make a traffic stop, and that a pursuit followed. Three men who were in it were taken in for questioning.

WALB reported that the vehicle has since been determined not to have been involved in the shooting.

An early account changing is ordinary in the first hours of a shooting investigation. Officers who arrive at a scene minutes after gunfire act on what is in front of them, and a vehicle leaving a block at that hour is something they will stop if they can.

What separates a first impression from a finding is the work that comes afterward, and in this case that work moved the inquiry off the pursued vehicle and onto the struggle inside a different one.

How can someone give information to Albany police?

APD asked anyone who knows something about the shooting to call the department at 229-431-2100 or Crime Stoppers at 229-436-TIPS.

Tips also go through the APD app, the department said.

APD said further details would follow once they are in hand.

How does Georgia law separate murder from manslaughter?

A death that happens while two people wrestle over a gun inside a car is the fact pattern in which Georgia’s homicide statutes pull apart from one another.

Georgia puts its homicide offenses in Title 16, Chapter 5, Article 1. The dividing line running through them is intent.

The first of them is O.C.G.A. § 16-5-1. Subsection (a) is malice murder: a killing carried out with malice aforethought, express or implied. Express malice is a deliberate intention to take a life, shown by outward circumstances; implied malice is inferred where no considerable provocation appears and the whole of the conduct shows an abandoned and malignant heart.

Malice in that sense is a legal term, not an everyday one. It carries no requirement of ill will toward the person killed, and it can be inferred from conduct rather than proved by a statement.

The reason the distinction matters at the investigative stage is that the same physical event — one person shot, one gun, two people in reach of it — can land in any of four statutory boxes depending on what a jury later concludes about intent and provocation.

A Georgia jury is not confined to the count on the indictment. Where the evidence supports it, the trial court charges the jury on lesser included offenses, so a murder indictment can end in a manslaughter verdict.

What is felony murder under Georgia law?

Subsection (c) of the same section covers it. Felony murder in Georgia is causing the death of another person while committing a felony, and the statute reaches that result irrespective of malice.

The practical effect is that the state does not have to prove an intent to kill. It has to prove the underlying felony and a causal link between that felony and the death.

Because malice is not an element, a felony murder count and a malice murder count can sit side by side in a single Georgia indictment over one death, resting on different theories of the same conduct.

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What does voluntary manslaughter require in Georgia?

O.C.G.A. § 16-5-2 is the next section, and subsection (a) sets the terms. Voluntary manslaughter covers a person who causes the death of another under circumstances that would otherwise be murder, but who acts solely as the result of a sudden, violent and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation sufficient to excite that passion in a reasonable person.

The word doing the work there is solely. If an interval passed between the provocation and the killing, and a reasonable person’s judgment would have cooled in that interval, the statute directs that the offense is murder rather than voluntary manslaughter.

That is why voluntary manslaughter in Georgia is often described as a crime of timing as much as of state of mind.

The provocation has to be serious enough to excite that passion in a reasonable person, which puts an objective test on top of the question of what the person actually felt.

What does involuntary manslaughter cover in Georgia?

O.C.G.A. § 16-5-3 takes the intent element away entirely. Subsection (a) reaches a person who causes the death of another without any intention to do so, by the commission of an unlawful act other than a felony.

The Supreme Court of Georgia worked through that provision in Cheeves v. State, decided Aug. 5, 2019, a case that turned on whether a jury in a shooting death should have been charged on involuntary manslaughter at all.

The section separates a death nobody meant to cause from one the law treats as murder, and the unlawful act it rests on has to fall short of a felony.

Which of these sections a set of facts supports is a question for a prosecutor first and a jury afterward. Those are the stages a Georgia homicide case moves through.

Who examines a death by violence in Georgia?

A coroner or a county medical examiner. O.C.G.A. § 45-16-24 is the section that governs, and subsections (a) and (b) identify the circumstances in which a coroner or county medical examiner acts on a death.

The Supreme Court of Georgia cited both subsections in Gines v. State, decided March 12, 2026, quoting the statute’s opening words. In Wallace v. State, decided May 6, 2025, the same court described the section as providing guidelines that bear on a victim’s autopsy.

Dougherty County has an elected coroner. Michael Fowler held that office earlier this month, when he confirmed a death on scene at Country Place Apartments in an unrelated Albany case.

The coroner’s work runs on a separate track from the police investigation and answers a different question. Police build a case about conduct; the death investigation establishes cause and manner, and its finding is what a prosecutor and a defense both take as the medical baseline.

In a shooting death, that examination fixes the path of the wound and the range at which the shot was fired. Both bear directly on an account in which a firearm was being struggled over inside a vehicle.

What happens after an Albany police homicide investigation?

The police file is the first step, not the last. APD builds the case; the decision on whether to bring a felony charge belongs to the district attorney’s office serving Dougherty County.

A felony prosecution in Georgia is presented to a grand jury of the county, which decides whether to return an indictment. Only after that does a case reach a trial calendar.

Dougherty County Superior Court is where such a case is tried. That court heard opening statements this month in the murder trial of Shaquille Mathis in the 2020 killing of Jawaski Kennedy, a case that took nearly six years to reach a jury.

That interval is the ordinary shape of a Georgia homicide case, not an unusual one.

A grand jury proceeding is not a trial. It hears the state’s presentation and decides only whether the case should go forward, and it returns an indictment on a lower standard than the one a trial jury applies.

Everyone in the process is presumed innocent until a conviction is returned, and that presumption applies with full force to a case in which no charge has been announced at all.

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Which agency holds the report, and how does a reader obtain it?

The Albany Police Department holds the incident report on the East Oglethorpe Boulevard call, because APD responded and APD is investigating.

Access runs through the Georgia Open Records Act. O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71 sets out the right of a member of the public to inspect and copy public records held by a state or local agency, and the Supreme Court of Georgia describes the act as running from § 50-18-70 onward.

The act has limits. O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72 is the exemption Georgia agencies invoke for records of a pending investigation or prosecution by a law enforcement or prosecutorial agency, and Georgia appellate courts have construed it repeatedly, among them the Supreme Court of Georgia in Evans v. Georgia Bureau of Investigation in 2015 and the Court of Appeals in Appen Media Group v. City of Sandy Springs in 2025.

An open case is the setting in which that exemption comes into play. APD has said the investigation on East Oglethorpe Boulevard is continuing.

The exemption is not a blanket. Georgia courts have read the act as favoring disclosure and have required agencies to justify what they withhold, which is why the reach of the pending-investigation provision keeps returning to the appellate courts.

A request for the report goes to the Albany Police Department’s records function, and the initial incident report is the document that ordinarily carries the date, the location, the responding unit and the offense classification.

What other violent-crime cases has Dougherty County seen this month?

Albany carried three separate cases through APD and the county courthouse earlier in August, each at a different stage of the process described above.

On a Wednesday night two weeks ago, a man was found dead at Country Place Apartments off Gillionville Road. Dougherty County Coroner Michael Fowler confirmed the death on scene, and APD opened the investigation.

The same week, APD released photographs of Shanard Hunt and Diontray Hawkins, each wanted on charges of armed robbery with a firearm and conspiracy to commit armed robbery.

And the Mathis trial put a 2020 Albany killing in front of a Dougherty County jury. Together the three trace the route a case takes from a scene to an indictment to a verdict.

What don’t we know yet?

What are readers asking about the East Oglethorpe Boulevard shooting?

What happened on East Oglethorpe Boulevard in Albany on Aug. 27, 2026?
A shooting killed a 17-year-old and left a second man hospitalized. The Albany Police Department said officers reached the 200 block of East Oglethorpe Boulevard at about 2:45 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026, on reports of a shooting.

Who was killed in the East Oglethorpe Boulevard shooting?
Jamar Phillips, 17. The Albany Police Department identified him as the teenage boy officers found in a parking lot near the scene, dead of a gunshot wound.

Where in Albany did the shooting happen?
In the 200 block of East Oglethorpe Boulevard in Albany, the seat of Dougherty County in southwest Georgia. Phillips was found in a parking lot nearby.

What time did the Albany shooting happen?
Officers were sent to the block at around 2:45 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026, the Albany Police Department said.

What happened to the second person who was shot?
A second male got in touch with dispatchers afterward to say he had been shot as well. He was taken to Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital and his condition was stable, the Albany Police Department said.

What did Albany police say caused the gunshot that killed Jamar Phillips?
Investigators determined that Phillips was in a vehicle with one other person when a struggle began over the vehicle and a firearm, the Albany Police Department said. Phillips was shot in the vehicle during that struggle and afterward fell from it.

What happened to the vehicle officers chased after the Albany shooting?
That vehicle has been ruled out of the shooting. Police said at first that officers had seen a vehicle leaving the area, that its driver did not stop for a traffic stop and that a pursuit followed, and that three men in it were taken in for questioning. WALB reported that the vehicle has since been determined not to have been involved.

Which county is the East Oglethorpe Boulevard shooting in?
Dougherty County, Georgia. Albany is the county seat.

Which agency is investigating the Albany shooting?
The Albany Police Department. APD said the case is still open and that further details would follow once they are in hand.

How does Georgia law separate murder from manslaughter?
O.C.G.A. § 16-5-1(a) covers murder committed with malice aforethought, express or implied. O.C.G.A. § 16-5-1(c) covers felony murder, a death caused during the commission of a felony. O.C.G.A. § 16-5-2(a) covers voluntary manslaughter, a killing that would otherwise be murder but is driven solely by a sudden, violent and irresistible passion arising from serious provocation. O.C.G.A. § 16-5-3(a) covers involuntary manslaughter in the commission of an unlawful act other than a felony.

Who examines a death by violence in Georgia?
A coroner or a county medical examiner. O.C.G.A. § 45-16-24(a) and (b) identify the circumstances in which a coroner or county medical examiner acts, and the Supreme Court of Georgia has described the section as providing guidelines for a post-mortem examination.

How does a member of the public request the Albany police report?
Through the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71, which sets out the right of access to public records held by an agency such as the Albany Police Department. O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72 is the exemption Georgia agencies invoke for records of a pending investigation or prosecution.

How can someone give information to Albany police about the shooting?
The Albany Police Department asked anyone with information to call the department at 229-431-2100 or Crime Stoppers at 229-436-TIPS, or to send a tip through the APD app.