Jurors rejected a defense claim that an old revolver fired by accident during a struggle.
JONESBORO, Ga. — A small-money dispute that began at a Jonesboro gas station ended in a felony murder conviction Friday, when jurors found Joe Link guilty in the shooting death of Coybern Jones Jr., a friend prosecutors said had been part of his life for three decades.
The case mattered not only because of the killing itself, but because prosecutors cast it as the collapse of a long friendship over a $30 loan and a borrowed pistol. Jones died on Oct. 30, 2023, after being shot in the neck near a cemetery road. Link said the gun fired during a struggle. Prosecutors said he threatened Jones, confronted him and then left him wounded in the roadway. After a week of testimony, jurors convicted Link of felony murder and aggravated assault, and he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
Opening statements laid out two sharply different stories. Assistant District Attorney Brianna Jordan told the jury that Link and Jones had known each other for years and spent time together so often that people around them viewed them as best friends. Their relationship, Jordan said, broke down when Link loaned Jones $30 and also let him borrow a .22 revolver. The men met at an Exxon station in Jonesboro so Jones could return the money and the gun, but the exchange turned heated. Prosecutors said Link confronted Jones with a pipe at the station, then followed him toward a cemetery and shot him. Jordan told the jury they would hear Link describe a tussle over the gun, but she said the evidence would show there was no such struggle and that the shooting was not an accident. Defense lawyer Erin King answered that the state had built too much around assumptions and too little around the gun itself.
King’s version centered on chaos, not planning. She told jurors that Link had gone to retrieve what belonged to him and that events spun out of control during a physical fight. In her telling, Jones had the revolver, the men struggled over it and the shot was fired as both men tried to control the weapon. She said Link was shocked by what happened and left in panic rather than after a deliberate killing. That account drew support from a firearms examiner who testified the revolver had been made before 1968 and that such a weapon can discharge without force on the trigger. Even so, prosecutors urged jurors to weigh the weapon evidence against everything else that happened before and after the shot. They pointed to testimony that Link had made a threat before the confrontation, to the movement from the gas station to the cemetery road, and to the fact that Jones was left where he fell. The body was found in the roadway near a cemetery after police were called on the evening of Oct. 30.
Police and witnesses filled in the broader timeline. Jonesboro police said Jones had argued with Link at the gas station shortly before the shooting. Officers later found Jones at Johnson Street and Woodland Drive with a fatal wound to the neck. A detective testified during trial that the gun was recovered 36 feet from Jones’ body, in front of a grave marker. That detail became one of the most vivid points in the prosecution case because it placed the weapon apart from the victim in a graveyard setting that jurors were unlikely to forget. In the courtroom, prosecutors also showed jurors a police interview with Link. At first, he denied shooting Jones. Later in the questioning, he admitted confronting him and said they had fought over the pistol. Former Lt. Christopher Cato testified that Link had sent a text saying he would “mess him up,” a statement prosecutors used to show anger before the killing. When Cato asked Link in the recorded interview why he had not called 911 for his best friend, prosecutors used the moment to argue that panic did not explain everything that followed.
The victim’s life outside the case added another layer. Jones was remembered by relatives and local political figures as an active presence in town. Arlene Charles, who was then running for mayor in Jonesboro, said Jones had become an informal campaign manager of sorts after he started driving around with her signs and urging people to support her. Family members said he was a disabled veteran who lived with PTSD. His sister said he could have sudden verbal outbursts, but she rejected any suggestion that he was violent, telling local television that he would not hurt anyone. Those descriptions did not decide the legal question before the jury, but they helped explain why the killing drew notice beyond the courthouse. It was not only a homicide case. It was also the death of a familiar local figure whose final argument happened in a place many residents knew, on a road near a cemetery after a stop at a neighborhood gas station.
By the end of the trial, the legal path had narrowed. Jurors heard evidence on malice murder, felony murder and aggravated assault, but their verdict showed how they sorted the claims. They did not convict on malice murder. They did convict on felony murder and aggravated assault, meaning they found criminal responsibility for the death even without accepting the highest intent theory presented by prosecutors. The deliberations took only a few hours after closing arguments on Feb. 27. Soon afterward, the court imposed a life sentence with the possibility of parole. That sentence marked the end of the trial phase, though the case could still move into appeals or other post conviction proceedings. What remains unknown in a fuller human sense is how a decades-long friendship reached that point. The public evidence provided a frame, a debt, a borrowed pistol, a threat, a confrontation and a fatal shot, but it could not fully explain the private grievances that made the conflict erupt.
The emotional force of the case came from the contrast between ordinary friendship and sudden violence. Jurors heard that the two men had spent years playing games together and sharing routine time. Then they heard prosecutors describe a confrontation over $30 and a borrowed gun that ended with Jones bleeding in the road and Link walking away. They heard the defense describe a split second in which an old revolver went off during a struggle. In the end, they chose the prosecution’s view of criminal responsibility. The verdict closed one chapter in Clayton County, but it left a stark public record: a man was killed near a cemetery, the friend accused of shooting him denied it, then admitted a fight over the weapon, and a jury decided that explanation did not excuse the death.
Link remains convicted of felony murder and aggravated assault in Jones’ death. The next formal step is likely to come through post trial motions or an appeal filed after sentencing.
Author note: Last updated March 24, 2026.