A late-night red light violation on SR 12 led Newton County deputies to a stolen handgun, an assault-style firearm and a haul of drugs early Thursday, ending with a 23-year-old Conyers man in custody facing a lengthy list of charges. The traffic stop, which happened around 12:32 a.m., has since been handed off to the sheriff's office's specialized investigators as they work to determine where the weapons came from.
Deputies pulled the driver over after watching the vehicle run a red light, according to FOX 5 Atlanta, which cited an official Newton County Sheriff's Office release. What started as a routine violation quickly escalated once deputies searched the vehicle and found a Glock handgun that had been reported stolen out of DeKalb County.
Guns, Drugs and Cash All Recovered at the Scene
Alongside the stolen Glock, deputies also recovered a Draco firearm, roughly 14 ounces of marijuana, mushrooms and what the release described as a large stash of cash, as noted by FOX 5 Atlanta. Authorities arrested Martez White, 23, of Conyers, in connection with the stop, per the same account.
White now faces several charges stemming from the search, including possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime, felony theft by receiving stolen property, possession of a Schedule I controlled substance, open container and disobeying a traffic control device, according to the agency release detailed in the report.
Georgia law treats possessing a firearm during certain felonies—including felony offenses involving controlled substances or marijuana—as a separate felony; the statute prescribes a five-year prison term upon conviction, to run consecutively to any other sentence. That is the legal framework for the firearm-during-a-crime charge listed in this case, though the charge itself is an allegation, not a finding of guilt. Georgia Code § 16-11-106 spells out the offense and its penalty.
Investigators Still Tracing the Firearms' Origins
The Newton County Sheriff's Office Special Investigations Division has taken over the case, per a report from FOX 5 Atlanta, while prosecutors handle White's formal charging. Detectives are separately working to trace where both recovered firearms originated.
The Newton County case also sits within a substantial volume of firearm-tracing work in Georgia: ATF recorded 23,937 firearms recovered and traced in the state during 2025. That figure is not a count of all guns used in crimes or all guns recovered; the agency cautions that not every firearm is traced and that traced guns are not a representative sample of crime guns. ATF’s 2025 Georgia data provides that important limit alongside the statewide total.
Tracing can help investigators follow a firearm’s documented path, but it does not by itself establish every transfer or who possessed the weapon at each stage. The ATF’s National Tracing Center uses a gun’s markings to identify its manufacturer or importer and can follow distribution records to the last known retail purchaser; the agency says its eTrace system is investigative—not a firearms registry. ATF’s description of the tracing process explains how those records can generate leads in local cases.
Several details remain undisclosed. The report says authorities have not released the total amount of cash seized or confirmed whether anyone else was riding in the vehicle at the time of the stop. Similarly, officials have not released details on where the Draco firearm came from, leaving that part of the investigation still open as detectives continue their work.
A separate, much larger firearms case announced in Georgia on October 6, 2026, involved 20 people indicted in an investigation of nearly 1,500 guns allegedly stolen from shipping facilities in Conley and Macon and trafficked alongside drugs. That federal case is not linked to the Newton County stop, but it illustrates how firearm investigations can expand from a recovered weapon to questions about theft and distribution networks. The U.S. Attorney’s Office announcement describes the separate allegations.
