GRIFFIN, Ga. — In video clips online, Deandre Head is shown in his element singing gospel music inside churches.
The 31-year-old had a lifelong passion for playing and singing gospel music and knew how to play several instruments. He planned to become a preacher according to his aunt.
"Lifting spirits. You know lifting people up when they fall down, he would lift them up," Deandre's aunt Anita Harps told 11Alive.
Harps said she helped raise her nephew after his dad died and then his mother also passed several years later. On Tuesday his own child, a daughter, was born.
"That is what is so heartbreaking because he didn't get a chance, he didn't get a chance to see his daughter," Harps said.
Deandre planned to meet his daughter Thursday when she came home from the hospital, Harps said, but she added COVID restrictions kept him out of the hospital.
On Wednesday he was hit and killed by a car in Griffin. That evening the Spalding County Sheriff's Office issued an alert of a hit-and-run along Patterson Road.
Deandre was hit early Wednesday night when he was walking in the grass alongside the road, according to Harps.
"The driver veered off the road and hit him," she said.
According to the Georgia State Patrol and Spalding County jail records, a 25-year-old man from Griffin is now in the county jail, charged with vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident.
After talking with investigators, Harps said she learned a witness to the crash provided information to law enforcement that offered insight into the crime and helped determine the car involved was a Dodge Charger.
In less than 24 hours, investigators identified a suspect and made an arrest. Deandre's family though is left wondering if he possibly could still be alive if the driver would have stopped and called 911.
"He should have stopped, I feel like he should have stopped and since he didn't it was senseless," Harps said.
"Why would a person not have empathy or compassion to help another human being?" said Montez Head, Deandre's cousin.