Appellant Jaime Watkins seeks to appeal his convictions for felony murder, armed robbery, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.1 For the reasons that follow, we affirm. 1. The convictions stem from events that occurred on November 1, 2004. The victims Dennis Banks and Nathaniel Woodard, both of St. Louis, Missouri were visiting Atlanta. They met Frazier Todd, III, who testified he offered to help the victims buy drugs. On the day of the crime, the victims drove in a rental car to pick Todd up at his house and then proceeded to an apartment complex in Fulton County. Todd left the two in the parking lot and went around the apartment building presumably to broker the drug deal. Shortly thereafter, appellant and his co-defendant Charles Long approached the victims’ rental car; Long approached the driver’s side where Banks was sitting and appellant approached the passenger side where Woodard was sitting. Appellant and Long brandished guns and proceeded to pistol whip and rob the victims of their property, including a backpack, the victims’ cell phones, and the victims’ wallets. While pistol whipping Woodard, appellant’s .22 caliber gun went off and the bullet fatally wounded Banks in the back of the head. After the shooting, appellant and Long fled. Because he believed Banks to be unconscious, Woodard climbed into the driver’s side of the vehicle and, while sitting on Banks,2 drove the car to a nearby church where the police were called. Although no ballistics evidence was recovered at the scene, the medical examiner recovered a .22 caliber bullet from Banks’ head during the autopsy.
About two months later, on February 25, 2005, appellant was the passenger in a car stopped by Marietta police for a traffic violation. Upon reviewing appellant’s identification, the Marietta police learned that there was an outstanding warrant for him for murder, the Atlanta police were called, and appellant was arrested. The police questioned Farhana Sultan, the driver of the car, and learned that appellant had visited her several times at the hotel in which she had been staying for two weeks preceding the traffic stop. The police obtained a warrant to search Sultan’s hotel room where they discovered a .22 caliber pistol which was believed to be the murder weapon. At trial, an expert witness testified it was inconclusive whether the gun collected from the hotel room fired the bullet recovered from Banks’ body. However, two witnesses identified the gun in open court and testified that they had seen appellant with it on the night of the shooting, as well as on several occasions prior thereto. Appellant admitted to police he was the person on the passenger’s side of the victim’s car, but told police that another person was the shooter and that appellant had the gun because he agreed to dispose of it for the shooter. Two witnesses confirmed appellant’s and Long’s presence near the crime scene immediately before and after the shooting took place. In addition, one witness testified he overheard appellant tell Long that he had not intended to shoot the victim. Although police did not recover the victims’ stolen cell phones, the person who had Woodard’s cell phone, which had a built-in camera, took a picture of his hand and inadvertently loaded it onto Woodard’s website. When police confronted appellant with the website picture, appellant agreed that the hand in the picture looked like his.
