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3 charged in Sunday's fatal service station shooting

Therese Apel
The Clarion-Ledger
Vicksburg resident Ricky Perkins is escorted into Warren County Circuit Court by a sheriff's deputy Tuesday morning. Perkins is charged with second degree murder, drive-by shooting and three counts of aggravated assault in a shooting early Sunday morning that left one man dead and hospitalized three others.

VICKSBURG - Three suspects in a Sunday morning service station shootout faced formal charges at their initial appearance in Warren County Court Tuesday.

Erick Lamonte Smith, 22, is charged with drive-by shooting, second degree murder and aggravated assault. Ricky Lee Perkins, 17, is charged with drive-by shooting, second degree murder and aggravated assault. Don Bell, 22, is charged with drive-by shooting and second degree murder. All three are from Vicksburg and were denied bond Tuesday.

Jerome Rankin, 22, was pronounced dead Sunday at 4:25 p.m. Three others were wounded by gunfire after the shooting broke out at the Kangaroo Express at the intersection of Mississippi 27 and U.S. 80 around 2:15 a.m., just after the bars closed, Sheriff Martin Pace.

Pace said he and his investigators are certain that the trio are not the only people involved in the shootings.

"As the investigation continues we expect additional arrests," Pace said.

Determining how many people were actually at the service station at the time of the shootout is part of what Pace called "a painstaking process" of interviewing witnesses and reviewing security footage from several different sources.

The victims were all men between 20 and 27. All of the victims were transferred from River Region Medical Center to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. Two have been released but one is still hospitalized.

Pace said he's not going to speculate on what the motive for the shooting might have been, and that it's still undetermined if any of the victims that were shot were actually a part of the altercation.

"This is just completely unacceptable in any community, but it is certainly not something that is going to be tolerated," Pace said. "Those persons responsible are going to be identified, they're going to be arrested and brought to justice."

ORIGINAL STORY: 1 of 4 dead in Warren County gas station shooting

Anyone with information on this incident is asked to call the Warren County Sheriff's Department at 601-636-1761 or CrimeStoppers at 601-355-TIPS (8477).

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Contact Therese Apel at tapel@gannett.com. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.