Good Guy with a Gun #22: Hattiesburg, MS
Original incident: November 26, 2023. The news doesn't say it outright, but the evidence is clear: An armed robbery resulted in a justifiable homicide by a GGWAG.
This is the kind of content featured in the 2026 Good Guy with a Gun one-page-per-day desk calendar.
At first glance the news reports only mention a “deadly shooting” at Heritage Apartments on November 26, 2023, and never say the deceased was among the aggressors. Read carefully, though, and the pieces fit together.
Around 4 PM that Sunday in midtown Hattiesburg, four people attempted to rob someone in the parking lot of the complex. Shots were fired. When police arrived minutes later, they found 24-year-old Brystin Varnado dead from a gunshot wound and declared the public was in no further danger.
Within days, the investigation led to charges against the two surviving participants, Mya Everett and Nikel Hammond, for attempted armed robbery. In court, the judge explicitly ordered them to stay away from the victim of that robbery — a person who clearly was not Varnado. Later, a third participant, Raytrell Alonzo Jones, was arrested and charged for the same incident (along with an independent charge of simple domestic violence).
Police have never publicly identified or charged the person who fired the fatal shot. Nearly two years later, no homicide charges have been filed. The only reasonable conclusion from the evidence: an armed citizen stopped an armed robbery, which resulted in a justifiable homicide.
One last, somewhat ironic note. I found this story because the deceased’s name was on the National Gun Violence Memorial. According to its “About” page, it was started in 2015 “to humanize the problem by showing victims’ faces and telling their stories.” Unfortunately, it didn’t humanize this story enough: The problem here wasn’t the “gun violence,” but the fact that these four people were willing to commit armed robbery. The violence that the victim used to protect himself was justified and good. It’s unfortunate that Varnado died, but that’s neither the gun’s fault nor the victim’s.
Sources
There was good coverage of this story, but none of it drew the obvious conclusions.
Four stories by WDAM 7: Initial, identification of Varnado, warrant issued for a third person, third person arrested.
The Pine Belt News had two stories.
WLBT3 had one story, which was really a follow-up to the initial WDAM stories.
That thing that never happens, happens every day.
Like the idea of a Good Guy with a Gun story every single day? Get the 2026 calendar! All 365 pages feature a news story from 2024.
In addition, this Substack will feature Good Guy with a Gun stories every day of the year, all taken from news stories so you can verify them yourself and share them around. They’ll generally be from about two years prior, which gives time to make sure there aren’t any legal or fraud issues to worry about.
Starting in 2026, we’ll open up paid subscriptions, and all paid subscribers will get seven posts per week. (People who bought a calendar will be eligible for a free full subscription.) Unpaid subscribers will still get two GGWAG stories every week.