Georgia · Hazlehurst · Crime & Courts

Hazlehurst, GA Shooting: Terrance McCoy, 16, Killed on Carey Street; 2 Teens Charged With Murder

A 16-year-old was found with a fatal gunshot wound after Hazlehurst police were called to Carey Street the night of Wednesday, Aug. 5. Two days later, two teenagers were charged. Both are presumed innocent, and neither has been convicted of anything.

What happened in Hazlehurst, Georgia?

A 16-year-old was shot and killed in Hazlehurst, Georgia, and two teenagers have been charged with murder. That is the whole of the confirmed story, and this page is going to be careful about not making it any bigger than that.

The WTOC report we are working from, published Aug. 11, 2026 at 9:46 a.m. EDT and credited to Alexis Derickson, attributes the arrests to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. WTOC's opening line is that two teens were arrested and charged with murder in Hazlehurst in connection to the death of a 16-year-old.

Per that report, the Hazlehurst Police Department first responded to reports of a shooting on Carey Street. When officers got to the scene, they found McCoy with a fatal gunshot wound.

The killing is placed at the night of Wednesday, Aug. 5. No hour is given. We are not going to supply one.

Two days later, on Friday, Aug. 7, Tyzhawn Corouthers, 17, and Donaven Smith, 18, both of Hazlehurst, were charged. They were booked into the Jeff Davis County Jail after their arrests.

Everything else you might want to know — a motive, a sequence, who was where, what the relationship was between any of these young men — has not been stated by any agency in the reporting we read. We are not filling those gaps. This is a case with one dead child and two accused teenagers in it, and the cost of guessing is paid by people who did not ask to be in the news.

Who was killed: Terrance McCoy, 16

The person who died was Terrance McCoy, of Hazlehurst. He was 16 years old.

He was found with a fatal gunshot wound when Hazlehurst officers reached Carey Street. WTOC also reports his body was taken to the GBI Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy. No source we read states whether he was pronounced dead at the scene or at a hospital, and no time of death has been given.

Nothing else about him has been published in the report we are citing — no school, no family details, no photograph beyond the fundraiser image that appears in WTOC's story. We are not inventing a biography for a 16-year-old. If his family wants him described a particular way, that is their call to make and ours to publish, not ours to guess at.

The spelling of his name, and why we are stopping to say this

There is a conflict inside the source, and we are going to handle it out loud rather than quietly pick a side.

WTOC's body text spells the victim's name "Terrance McCoy." A GoFundMe caption embedded in the same article spells it "Terrence McCoy." Same story, two spellings, one letter apart.

We use "Terrance," the body-text spelling, throughout this page — including in the headline, the URL and the structured data — because that is the spelling the newsroom used in its own reporting rather than in a caption pulled from a third-party fundraiser page.

But we are stating plainly that the article carries both spellings, and that we do not know which one his family uses. No official record has been published that settles it.

Getting a dead child's name wrong is not a typo. It is the last public record of who he was, and it outlives the news cycle by decades. That is worth three paragraphs.

Who has been arrested and charged

Two people, both from the same town as the person who died.

Both face the same set of charges. No source we read distinguishes between what each of them is alleged to have done. That distinction — who is accused of what, specifically — is not public.

No attorney has been named for either of them in the reporting we read, and no plea has been reported. We have seen no bond information, no first-appearance date and no indictment.

The charges, exactly as they were listed

WTOC lists the charges as murder, aggravated assault and two counts of violation of the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, filed on Friday, Aug. 7.

Read that list slowly, because each line is doing different work:

Charges are allegations chosen by investigators at the front end of a case. They routinely change. Prosecutors add counts, drop counts, and take a different set to a grand jury than the one on the arrest paperwork. What a person is booked on in August is frequently not what they stand trial on.

What is the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act?

Here is where we are going to disappoint you on purpose.

Two of the four counts are violations of the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act. That is the name of the statute as WTOC reported it. It is a real Georgia law, and it is the name printed on the charge.

We are not going to characterize what that statute requires, what conduct it covers, or what it takes to convict under it — because we were unable to read the statutory text at a source we can cite and link on this page. Georgia's official code portal did not return readable text for us, and the third-party code mirrors we tried block automated retrieval. Rather than describe a criminal statute from memory, we are telling you we do not have it.

What we can say without reading a word of the statute:

Attention: a statute with the words "street gang" in its title generates a specific set of assumptions the moment it appears in a headline. Those assumptions are not evidence. If and when a court record or a named official describes the alleged conduct behind those two counts, we will publish that description and cite it. Until then this section stays this short.

Charged is not convicted, and one of them is 17

Tyzhawn Corouthers and Donaven Smith are presumed innocent. Neither has been convicted of anything in this case. There is no verdict, no plea and no trial in the reporting we read.

This is not a disclaimer we paste at the bottom. It is the actual legal status of both of them right now, and it will remain their status unless and until a court says otherwise. An arrest is a decision by investigators. A conviction is a decision by a jury or a judge. Those are separated by months, sometimes years, and cases collapse in between more often than the public record ever advertises.

One of the two is 17 years old. We are not going to walk you through Georgia's juvenile transfer rules from memory, for the same reason we did not summarize the gang statute: we have not read a citable source for it in the course of writing this page.

What is worth saying plainly: this story contains three teenagers. One of them is dead. The other two are accused. Nobody in it is over 18.

Timeline: Wednesday night to Friday's charges

The sequence is short, and the gaps in it are as important as the entries.

Chronology assembled from a single named outlet's report of GBI information. No clock time has been published for the shooting, the arrests or the booking. The only timestamp on this page that is precise is the moment the story was published.

Hazlehurst police and the GBI are not interchangeable

Several agencies appear in this story, doing different jobs. Coverage that blurs them makes it harder for a family to know who to call.

The short version: a city police department got there first; a state agency has the case. That is the ordinary shape of a homicide investigation in a small Georgia city, and the next section explains why.

Who investigates homicides in small Georgia cities?

Not the city, usually. Not because the city is bad at it, but because a police department in a town this size may work a handful of death investigations in a decade and does not carry a standing homicide unit, a crime lab or a full-time forensic capability.

That is the gap the Georgia Bureau of Investigation exists to fill. The GBI describes itself on its own site as "an independent, statewide agency that supports the state's criminal justice system in the areas of criminal investigations, forensic laboratory services and computerized criminal justice information." The same page says that "Special agents from the Investigative Division respond to requests for assistance from local law enforcement officials to investigate major crimes throughout Georgia." That language is on gbi.georgia.gov.

Two things follow from that description, and they matter for reading this story:

What we can say about this specific case: WTOC attributes the arrests and charges to the GBI, and the GBI is investigating. We have not read a GBI press release on this case ourselves, and we are not going to describe one we did not read.

Where is Hazlehurst, Georgia — and which Hazlehurst?

This matters more than it sounds like it does, because there is also a Hazlehurst in Mississippi, and searches for "Hazlehurst shooting" collide across two states constantly. If you landed here from a search, this is the Georgia one.

Hazlehurst, Georgia is a small city in south Georgia, and it is the county seat of Jeff Davis County. That is geography, not reporting, and we are labeling it as such.

We are not publishing population figures, land area or distances for Hazlehurst on this page, because we did not read them at a source we can cite while writing this. We would rather leave a number out than put an unsourced one in a story about a dead child.

Schematic only. The county outline is illustrative and not a survey boundary. The exact block of Carey Street has not been released, so no address is plotted.

The Jeff Davis County question

A small point of precision, because it affects how this story gets indexed and repeated.

WTOC places the shooting on Carey Street in Hazlehurst. It does not attach a county to that street. Where a county does appear in the report is the booking: Corouthers and Smith were booked into the Jeff Davis County Jail.

Hazlehurst is the county seat of Jeff Davis County, so filing this story under Jeff Davis County is a reasonable and standard editorial decision — but it is a geographic inference, not a sentence anyone said about the crime scene. We are flagging that rather than letting the URL do the arguing.

Attention: "Jeff Davis County" is not unique to Georgia. There is a Jeff Davis County in Texas and a Jefferson Davis Parish in Louisiana. If you are searching, keep "Hazlehurst" and "GA" in the query.

How to give investigators information

WTOC published two routes for anyone with information.

Both of those come from the WTOC report linked in our sources. Call the agency, not us. The Local Alert is a news site. We do not take tips on behalf of investigators, we cannot pass information to them in any official capacity, and anything you send us is not confidential the way a call to a tip line is.

The fundraiser for the family

WTOC reported that a GoFundMe fundraiser has been set up for the family of McCoy to help pay for funeral expenses.

We are not linking or naming a specific fundraiser page here. Fundraisers set up after a child's death attract impostor pages within hours, and a link published by a news site becomes the thing scammers clone. If you want to give, go through the fundraiser as it appears inside WTOC's own story, which is linked in our sources below, or through someone you can confirm is connected to the family.

The caption on that fundraiser image is also where the second spelling of the victim's name appears. See the section above.

What we don't know yet

This page will be updated as the GBI, the Hazlehurst Police Department, the courts and named outlets release more. Nothing above is filled in by inference, and this story rests on a single named outlet — which is itself a limitation we are naming rather than hiding.

If your family is living through this

A 16-year-old is dead and two families in the same town are on the other side of it. There is no version of this week that is survivable on schedule, and nobody should be handling the logistics of it alone.

A few practical things worth knowing. The investigative file, the autopsy findings and the court record all move on separate clocks and are held by separate offices, which is why families often get answers in an order that makes no emotional sense. Funeral arrangements do not have to wait on a case being solved. And you are not obligated to give a recorded statement to anyone — an insurer, a reporter, a stranger on the phone — while you are still identifying or burying a family member.

Attention: after a killing this public, families get contacted by people who found their name in a story like this one. Slow down before agreeing to anything, and verify who you are talking to.

Frequently asked questions

What happened in Hazlehurst, GA?
A 16-year-old was shot and killed. WTOC reported that the Hazlehurst Police Department first responded to reports of a shooting on Carey Street and found Terrance McCoy with a fatal gunshot wound, the night of Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. Two days later, on Friday, Aug. 7, two teenagers were charged with murder. Both are presumed innocent and neither has been convicted.

Who was killed in the Hazlehurst, Georgia shooting?
Terrance McCoy, of Hazlehurst. He was 16 years old. He was found with a fatal gunshot wound when officers reached the scene on Carey Street. No source we read states whether he was pronounced dead at the scene or at a hospital.

Is his name spelled Terrance McCoy or Terrence McCoy?
The article we are citing carries both spellings. WTOC's body text spells it Terrance McCoy. A GoFundMe caption embedded in the same article spells it Terrence McCoy. We use Terrance, the body-text spelling, and we are stating plainly that the source is inconsistent. We do not know which spelling his family uses, and we will correct this page if someone who knows tells us.

Who has been arrested in the Hazlehurst shooting?
Tyzhawn Corouthers, 17, and Donaven Smith, 18, both of Hazlehurst. They were charged on Friday, Aug. 7, 2026 and were booked into the Jeff Davis County Jail. Both are presumed innocent.

What are Tyzhawn Corouthers and Donaven Smith charged with?
Murder, aggravated assault, and two counts of violation of the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, as listed by WTOC. No source we read separates what each of them is individually alleged to have done.

Have Tyzhawn Corouthers and Donaven Smith been convicted?
No. They have been charged, not convicted. There is no plea, no trial and no verdict in the reporting we read. Both are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court, and one of them is 17 years old.

What is the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act?
It is the name of the Georgia statute under which two of the four counts were filed, as reported by WTOC. We are not describing what the statute requires or what conduct it covers, because we were unable to read the statutory text at a source we can cite and link. What we can say is that no agency in the reporting we read has alleged that anyone in this case belongs to a gang, named a gang, or described a gang connection. The name of a statute is not a finding.

When did the Hazlehurst shooting happen?
The night of Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. No clock time has been reported, and we are not going to supply one.

Where in Hazlehurst did the shooting happen?
On Carey Street. The exact block has not been released.

What county is Hazlehurst, Georgia in?
Hazlehurst is the county seat of Jeff Davis County. That is geography. The report we are citing places the shooting on Carey Street in Hazlehurst without attaching a county to the street, though it does say the two people charged were booked into the Jeff Davis County Jail.

Which agency is investigating the Hazlehurst shooting?
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The Hazlehurst Police Department first responded to reports of the shooting. Those are two different agencies with two different roles, and no source we read states who requested the GBI or when.

Who investigates homicides in small Georgia cities?
Frequently the Georgia Bureau of Investigation rather than the local department. The GBI describes itself on its own site as an independent, statewide agency supporting the state's criminal justice system in criminal investigations, forensic laboratory services and computerized criminal justice information, and says special agents from its Investigative Division respond to requests for assistance from local law enforcement officials to investigate major crimes throughout Georgia. A state agency taking a case like this is ordinary and does not signal anything unusual about the incident.

How can someone give investigators information about the Hazlehurst shooting?
WTOC published two routes: the GBI's Regional Investigative Office in Douglas at 912-389-4103, or anonymous tips at 1-800-597-TIPS (8477), online, or through the See Something, Send Something mobile app. Contact the agency, not this news site.

Is this the Hazlehurst in Georgia or the one in Mississippi?
Georgia. There is a separate city named Hazlehurst in Mississippi, and searches collide across the two constantly. This story is Hazlehurst, Georgia, the county seat of Jeff Davis County.

Is there a fundraiser for Terrance McCoy's family?
WTOC reported that a GoFundMe fundraiser has been set up for the family of McCoy to help pay for funeral expenses. We are not naming or linking a specific fundraiser page, because impostor pages appear quickly after a child's death. Give through the fundraiser as it appears inside WTOC's own story, or through someone you can confirm is connected to the family.