Jason Meade guilty of reckless homicide in the death of Casey Goodson Jr.

In the years since Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Meade shot and killed her son, Casey Goodson Jr., Tamala Payne has continued to post photos to social media in which he’s never older than 23 – the age at which Meade approached Goodson outside of his grandmother’s house on Dec. 4, 2020, shooting him six times from behind with a high-powered rifle.

On Thursday, a Franklin County jury found Meade guilty of reckless homicide in the death of Goodson. Meade had been charged with murder and reckless homicide, and when the jury couldn’t come to agreement on the murder charge, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge David Young declared a mistrial on that count. (An earlier trial for Meade also ended in mistrial, and in 2024 Payne settled a civil lawsuit with the county for $7 million.)

Meade faces a maximum of three years in prison for his conviction on charges of reckless homicide, a third-degree felony in Ohio, with sentencing scheduled to take place on July 19. 

After the trial, Payne told the press that she would like to see the former sheriff’s deputy return to court for a third round. “I would like to see him convicted of murder,” Payne said, as reported by The Columbus Dispatch. “He has to be held accountable for what he did to Casey.”

Over the years, Payne has been steadfast in posting to social media about her son, telling me in early 2021 that she wasn’t going to fall silent and allow outside forces to define the man she knew him to be. And these efforts have not been in vain. At a January 2023 party for what would have been Goodson’s 26th birthday, LaQuisa Richardson of Ace Community House told me she had never met Goodson and only knew of him through the images shared by his mother. “I did not know Casey, but I feel like I do from the pictures, from the videos,” she said. “So, when I think of him, I picture him on the grill, at family reunions, at family parties.”

All of these dimensions and more have surfaced in the recorded trove that Payne continues to post on social media, and which I detailed in this 2021 Columbus Alive feature.

Here’s Goodson as a young boy on Christmas morning, no older than 4 or 5 years old, posing with a still-boxed toy motorcycle. As he entered into adulthood, motorcycles would escalate from a childhood fascination into an all-consuming hobby and source of escape. Carter said Goodson told her he appreciated the way the world would disappear as he rode. The narrow focus required to handle the machine forced all outside concerns to fall away.

Here’s Goodson with a snake curled around his neck, completely at ease, as he was with all animals. He got his first pet, a hamster named Cinnamon, in first grade, and later adopted everything from dogs to African frogs and snakes, which some traced to a natural caretaker instinct.

Here’s Goodson on the beach in Florida, his arm around his grandmother, Sharon Payne, who helped raise Goodson alongside her late husband, Ernest Payne, and who made the initial 911 call after police shot her grandson outside of the family’s North Side residence.

Here’s Goodson smiling next to one of his younger brothers. The oldest of 10 children, Goodson served as both a father and a brother to his siblings well into young adulthood, which until recently made him resistant to having children of his own. “He wanted to do it right, because he knew he didn’t want to be what he had,” Carter said of Goodson’s desire to avoid retracing the same footsteps as his own absentee father.

And here’s Goodson behind the wheel of a car, which is where he found himself on an early December afternoon when he crossed paths with Meade, who, along with others in law enforcement, had just completed an unrelated search for a suspect in nearby Estate Place. After spotting Goodson, Meade entered into a pursuit that ended when he shot and killed the 23-year-old.