Pregnant woman is shot to death

The investigation into a deadly shooting Monday at an Evergreen grocery store remained ongoing earlier this week as an Evergreen man remained behind bars on three counts of capital murder.

According to Allison Gessner with the Evergreen Police Department, Evergreen resident Lavon McCreary, who would have turned 28 years old on Tuesday, was shot to death around 4:45 p.m. Monday inside the Pic-N-Sav grocery store at 320 West Front St. in Evergreen. McCreary, who was pregnant at the time, had been shot multiple times with a handgun, but the shooter was not at the scene when officers arrived, Gessner said.

Officials say that McCreary was about eight months pregnant around the time of her death. McCreary’s 5-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son were with their mother in the grocery store at the time of the shooting.

Later on Monday evening, 39-year-old Michael Collin Mitchell, who lives at 72 Peachtree Drive in Evergreen, turned himself over to the Conecuh County Sheriff’s Department, where he was booked into the Conecuh County Jail on capital murder charges. Mitchell remained in jail as of Tuesday afternoon and was being held without bond.

Officials declined to comment on what led up to the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation, but Gessner confirmed that McCreary and Mitchell did have children together. Officials indicated that more details would be made available in the case as the investigation unfolds.

Court documents reflect that Mitchell is facing three counts of capital murder. One count stems from Mitchell’s alleged shooting of McCreary, which caused her death and that of her unborn child. Mitchell is also facing two additional counts of capital murder under a state law that makes it a capital offense to intentionally cause the death of another person in the presence of children under the age of 14.

Conecuh County law enforcement officials struggled earlier this week to remember any similar violent crimes that have taken place locally in such a public place. Most agreed that the last major violent crime to take place in a public place was the Nov. 20, 1996 killings of Richard Cary, 52, Scott Williams, 39, and Timothy Bryan Cane, 13, at Cary’s Store in the Brooklyn community. Williams, Cary and Crane were brutally killed when Ethan Eugene Dorsey and Calvin Middleton, both of Andalusia, planned a robbery at the country store at Brooklyn. Middleton is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for his role in the triple murder, and Dorsey was denied parole in November 2018.