Deontarius Otis Slaughter appeals his convictions for felony murder while in the commission of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony in connection with the fatal shooting of Jarvis Beasley. Slaughter challenges the trial court’s denial of his oral motion to dismiss a panel of the venire and the sufficiency of the evidence of his guilt. Finding the challenges to be without merit, we affirm.1 The evidence construed in favor of the verdicts showed the following. On March 2, 2009, Slaughter borrowed his girlfriend’s burgundy Mitsubishi, which bore temporary license tags, and her cell phone. He returned the car around 2:30 p.m. or 3:00 p.m. that afternoon, and told his girlfriend to cancel her cell phone, saying that he lost it; she complied with the request. Jarvis Beasley was spending a lot of time at his uncle’s apartment in DeKalb County, and he began selling the drug ecstacy. On March 2, 2009, Beasley’s uncle returned home and witnessed Beasley on the telephone. Shortly thereafter, there was a knock on the apartment door, Beasley peered through the peephole, and then exited the apartment joining an African American man outside and locked the apartment door behind him, acting “as if he knew who it was.” After about a minute, Beasley’s uncle heard “some scuffle” and then two gunshots. The uncle opened the door and saw Beasley “slumped over on the steps”; blood was “pouring” out of Beasley and he was unresponsive. The police responded after a radio dispatch at approximately 2:24 p.m.
A few minutes before the shooting, three young African American men were seen peering over a fence toward the apartment complex. Just after the gunfire, two of the men were seen running after and jumping into a burgundy Mitsubishi with temporary license tags. Also, about 14 minutes before the shooting was reported, there were three communications in rapid succession between Beasley’s phone and the phone Slaughter had borrowed from his girlfriend. The first was a text to Beasley asking, “what’s up on them ten packs”; the “ten pack” was street parlance for a pack of ten ecstacy pills. Over the next few minutes, there was an incoming call to Beasley from the phone lent to Slaughter and then a call from Beasley to that same phone.
