Rolando Millan, against whom the Georgia Bureau of Investigation issued murder warrants Monday for the Fourth of July killing of three Bulloch County residents, is in the Augusta Youth Detention Center serving a sentence for unrelated juvenile charges.
Millan, 16, eventually will be booked into the Bulloch County Jail, but probably not until next spring, key law enforcement officers said Thursday morning. GBI Region 5 Special Agent in Charge Chris DeMarco and Bulloch County Sheriff Noel Brown spoke to reporters in front of the regional GBI office south of Statesboro. The warrants, on three counts of felony murder for the shooting deaths of Brittany Sneed Mack, 35, Travis Sneed, 37, and Kristina Soles, also 37, were issued with the intent that Millan will be tried as an adult.
“Upon his completion with his sentence with YDC, Millan will eventually be transported here to Bulloch County and officially be booked into the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office,” DeMarco said. “Like I said, he has officially been served with those murder warrants but he has not officially been booked into the Bulloch County Jail.”
A Sheriff’s Office deputy told reporters this probably won’t happen until sometime in the first half of 2022. In response to reporters’ questions, DeMarco said his understanding was that Millan’s YDC sentence will run out in April and that investigators learned in August he was in the YDC. But the agent said he didn’t know the exact nature of the unrelated juvenile charges.
July Fourth tragedy
On July 4, the Sheriff‘s Office had been called to Lundy’s Trailer Park, off Miller Street Extension outside the Statesboro city limits around 7 p.m. Deputies found Brittany Mack suffering from gunshot wounds on the porch of a residence. She died on the way to the hospital.
Officers from the BCSO and Statesboro Police Department’s Special Response Team then entered the home and found Sneed and Soles both dead from gunshot wounds. Sneed and Mack were brother and sister, and Soles was Sneed’s girlfriend, according to investigators.
Soles, a Brooklet resident and 2001 graduate of Southeast Bulloch High School, was employed by Mid-Georgia Pharmacy in Savannah at the time of her death, according to her obituary. She is survived by two daughters.
Sneed was a Bulloch County native, a private landscaper and a longtime member of the Hutchinson Longstreet Baptist Church, according to his obituary. He is survived by two daughters.
Mack was a Bulloch County native and a graduate of Southeast Bulloch High School, according to her obituary. She was a longtime member of the Hutchinson Longstreet Baptist Church and she worked as a supervisor for Krystal’s of Statesboro. She is survived by a son.
No motive disclosed
The victims were shot multiple times, DeMarco confirmed Thursday in response to a question from the Statesboro Herald. He declined to go into details such as the ownership of the gun or guns used, or what the relationship was between the suspect and the victims, such as whether they were friends or neighbors.
“I can’t get into the motive right now as well,” DeMarco said.
But in answer to a question from a television reporter, he revealed that Millan, whose hometown was given as East Point, just south of Atlanta, in the press release, was living in Bulloch County at the time of the killings.
“Yes, he was living here at the time,” DeMarco said. “He does have family here in Bulloch County.”
The sheriff and lead GBI agent indicated that investigators began to get leads when they canvassed the trailer park immediately after the killings, followed by tips received, some anonymously, after an initial news release.
“The public has been a tremendous help in this case,” DeMarco said. “Without their help, that generated a lot of leads, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”
The GBI and law enforcement request that anyone with information contact the Bulloch County Sheriff‘s Office at (912) 764–8888 or the GBI Regional Investigative Office in Statesboro at (912) 871–1121.
Tips may also be submitted by calling (800) 597- 8477 or online at https://gbi.georgia.gov/submit-tips-online.
Investigation continues
He said he wasn’t going into whether investigators expect to make any additional arrests. Additional charges against Millan are likely, since a “felony murder” charge implies a death was caused during commission of another felony. But DeMarco noted that decisions about any added charges will be up to the Ogeechee Circuit District Attorney’s Office, which the GBI consulted before taking the murder warrants.
“The case is still active and ongoing,” DeMarco said. “In fact, we’ve got agents still out this morning actually running down some additional leads. … So we still encourage the public, if there’s any more information they have … to call the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office or the GBI Region 5 office.”
Noting that the investigation was “a joint effort,” Brown thanked “all of the agencies involved, from the night of that incident, the Statesboro Police Department, the Georgia State Patrol, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, on up through the next couple of hours of that day and the mid-morning, the Chatham County Sheriff’s Office, Georgia Southern (University) Police Department, and probably others” as well as citizens.
He said he hoped the charging of a suspect will bring “maybe some closure, maybe some peace” to the victims’ families.