A months-long manhunt for a Smyrna murder suspect ended Thursday when police say they caught the man breaking into cars just a mile from the scene of the killing he's accused of committing. Trey Webb had been wanted since early August in connection with a fatal shooting on Atlanta Road that left a man dead hours after he was shot in the head during what an arrest warrant describes as a drug deal.
According to Atlanta News First, Smyrna police responded to a single-car accident on July 28 in the 3000 block of Atlanta Road and found a man inside the vehicle with a gunshot wound. The victim died hours later from a head wound suffered during the alleged drug deal, per the arrest warrant, and his identity still has not been released. Police identified Webb as a suspect and secured a murder warrant just days afterward, kicking off a manhunt that, per WSB-TV, stretched more than two months across the metro area.
That search ended Thursday when officers responded to a report of suspects stealing from cars in the 1800 block of Spring Road, about a mile north of the original shooting scene. Officers arrived to find two men actively breaking into vehicles, and the station's report notes police identified one of them as Webb. He was booked into the Cobb County Jail on the outstanding murder warrant along with additional charges that Smyrna police have not specified.
Geography Links Two Crime Scenes
The proximity between the two incidents is notable: the Spring Road arrest site sits roughly one mile north of the 3000 block of Atlanta Road where the fatal shooting happened in July, per the same account from WSB-TV. Smyrna Police Department headquarters at 2646 Atlanta Road, which houses a Criminal Investigations Division split into separate Person Crimes and Property Crimes units, sits less than a mile from the homicide scene itself, according to the City of Smyrna.
Police have not released the identity of the second man found breaking into cars alongside Webb, nor detailed what role, if any, he played in the case. The additional charges filed against Webb beyond murder also remain unspecified by Smyrna police.
What Georgia Law Means for Webb's Case
Under Georgia Code § 17-6-12, both murder and entering an automobile with intent to commit theft or a felony are classified as bail-restricted offenses, according to Justia, meaning judges cannot grant Webb unsecured judicial release on either charge. The vehicle break-in charge alone is a felony carrying one to five years in state prison under Georgia Code § 16-8-18, per the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A murder conviction carries far steeper exposure: Georgia Code § 16-5-1 mandates sentencing of death, life without parole, or life with the possibility of parole, according to FindLaw.
A Tough Fall for Smyrna
Webb's arrest caps a difficult stretch of violent crime cases for Smyrna police. The department charged a teenager on September 24 after a woman's body was found at Park Valley Apartments, and a man fled north on Florence Road after a September doorstep shooting on Snowbird Drive. Those cases followed an August incident in which a rifle-wielding gunman sprayed gunfire at an apartment door off Atlanta Road.
Smyrna recorded a violent crime rate of 227.5 per 100,000 residents and two homicides in 2024, according to 2024 FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data compiled by OpenCrime. Cobb County law enforcement agencies also lean on a network of 182 Flock automated license-plate reader cameras positioned across the county to help track wanted suspects, as reported by FOX 5 Atlanta.
