Grief, outrage at vigil for slain Grant Park bartender

A gathering of more than 200 people Thursday morning outside a Grant Park-area restaurant was billed as a protest against cuts in Atlanta’s police services.

• Memorial fund established

JOHN SPINK / jspink@ajc.com

Friends left flowers and candles at the early-morning vigil on Thursday in Grant Park.

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John Henderson

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It turned out to be more of a candlelight vigil for John Henderson, the 27-year-old waiter who was killed early Wednesday when armed men burst into Standard Food & Spirits and robbed it while Henderson and a bartender were closing up. Henderson was shot four times, twice in the head; the robbers remain on the loose.

People who knew Henderson well, people whom he waited on at the Standard and complete strangers filled the Standard’s parking lot early Thursday to remember the bushy-haired Maryland native who made friends at every restaurant where he worked over the years.

“I think it’s pretty amazing,” Kelly Dugan, 25, said of the turnout for Henderson, a good friend and former co-worker. “I’m really happy that all these people showed up.”

Rontre Green, a server at the nearby restaurant Six Feet Under, where Henderson once tended bar, cried as he remembered him.

“I pray that the people who did this are convicted in their own minds and their own hearts that they took another man’s life for no reason,” he said. “It is my prayer that they don’t get a single night’s sleep until they turn themselves in.”

But if the gathering was quiet and somber, some who attended voiced concern about recent Atlanta police furloughs at a time when intown dwellers say crime is on the rise.

Among them was Atlanta City Councilwoman Mary Norwood, whose comments sparked a verbal skirmish with Mayor Shirley Franklin.

“We have to get this city safe,” Norwood said at the vigil. “This is unacceptable. The idea that we have a city where this kind of violence can happen is completely unacceptable. You can’t have a city that’s safe in some places and not in others.”

Norwood also criticized Franklin’s administration for the way cuts have been made.

“What we have seen is cuts made without consultation and collaboration,” she said, adding that police proposals for cost-cuts have not been implemented.

The city council approved this year’s budget, turning down Franklin’s advice to raise taxes and maintain public safety staffing in the face of a $140 million shortfall. But it was Franklin who decided how and where the cuts would be made. No police officers were laid off.

Last month, though, Franklin ordered citywide furloughs — including the police and fire departments — to make up for an additional $50 million shortfall.

Franklin, reached by phone later Thursday, said Norwood’s comments were inappropriate.

“I find it ludicrous and irresponsible for her to make statements about something she knows not,” the mayor said. “I engaged the council in a discussion and debate. They chose to roll back taxes in the face of my advice and recommendation that we would have to cut public safety. She has never, ever called me to talk about it.”

At the Thursday morning vigil, Atlanta police Officer Andrew Fincher and two fellow officers stood on the edge of the crowd outside the Standard.

They had just finished working the graveyard shift in the police zone that includes the “Memorial Corridor,” the stretch of Memorial Drive near Oakland Cemetery that includes the Standard and other popular hangouts. Rather than heading home as usual, they drove to the Standard.

“It’s just sad,” Fincher said. “We work here. We fight it every night.”

Fincher said people who live in places like Grant Park and Cabbagetown aren’t mistaken; violent crime has been on the rise for the last three years.

“With the economy getting worse, they’re getting more bold,” Fincher said of criminals.

The Police Department doesn’t have enough officers to properly patrol the streets, Fincher said. At last count, the department had 1,623 sworn officers — far short of 2,000, the target number often cited by police and city officials.

The city is divided into six police precincts. On a given night in Fincher’s, eight to 10 officers are working, he said, “and that’s on a good night.”

The precinct needs at least five to seven more bodies, he said. But more officers are leaving the department for smaller police agencies in metro Atlanta, rather than deal with the lack of pay raises and recent furloughs that amount to a 10% pay cut.

“If the city can’t get it together and keep the officers that it has, this is going to continue,” Fincher said. “It’s going to get worse.”

Many in the crowd at the Standard vigil wondered how much worse it can get.

“We’re afraid,” said Lori Cobbs, 39, who lives in East Atlanta. “We used to feel safe in our house. Now we’re afraid our door will be kicked in.”

Cobbs has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years, but never felt afraid until the last year or so. Two neighbors have been victims of crime recently.

“Three doors down, she came home in the morning to find two guys in her house making a pile of her valuables,” Cobbs said. “The neighbor behind me got robbed at gunpoint.”

Kimberly Krautter, 44, lives at the Mattress Factory Lofts, not far from the Standard. She didn’t know Henderson, but he had waited on her.

A resident for five years, she saw a similar crime rise in the fall of 2007. People were being robbed, held up at gunpoint.

Residents got together and complained to the Police Department. As a result, they saw more police officers in the neighborhood, she said.

“And all those incidents stopped,” Krautter said.

It’s time for another crackdown, she said.

DONATIONS

To donate to the John Henderson Memorial Fund, go to www.grantpark.org and follow the link to make a donation via credit card or mail donations by check or money order to: Grant Park Neighborhood Association, P. O. Box 89235, Atlanta, GA 30312. Please designate “John Henderson Memorial Fund” on the donation.