GSU student attacked in area where Tech student shot

Less than 24 hours before a Georgia Tech student was shot during a Monday night carjacking, a Georgia State University student was kidnapped and shot by three men in the same area of northwest Atlanta.

The victim, Carsten Singh, 22, said police told him there was a “high probability” that he was attacked by the same men who critically wounded the Tech student.

Singh said he was in the parking deck of his girlfriend’s apartment on 16th Street near Northside Drive at about 1:30 a.m. Monday when he was approached by three armed men.

The men forced the senior economics and classical languages student into a van at gunpoint, and drove him around Atlanta for about 45 minutes.

At one point, Singh said, one of the suspects took his ATM card, demanded his personal identification number and was dropped off by the other two men at an ATM.

After that suspect called his accomplices and told them that the PIN had worked with the card, Singh was driven to a deserted dead-end street in the West End area.

“They told me to get out and to take two steps forward,” Singh said. “I pleaded with them not to kill me through tears.”

He said one of the kidnappers then shot him in the leg, and the two men drove off.

“I got up and ran a good 75 meters down the road before I got to the first houses,” Singh said.

“I knocked on at least 10 doors, and no one would open the door,” he said. “I started screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘help.’”

Singh said a security guard at a nearby school heard his screams and called 911.

The wounded student was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, where doctors “told me I had the luckiest wound they could imagine. [The bullet] went in and out, and didn’t hit the bone.”

Singh said an Atlanta police detective later told him there is a “high probability” that his attackers were the same men responsible for shooting Georgia Tech student Patrick Whaley Monday night as he and two other people walked out of the Tivoli Tenside Apartments on Northside Drive near the Tech campus — about half a mile from the parking deck where Singh was attacked.

The suspects in that case forced the victims to the ground, while they took their wallets, purses and car keys. One of the suspects fired a shot after Whaley refused to get in a van with them, police said.

Whaley was struck in the back, and remains hospitalized at Grady.

Singh said the only description he has of his kidnappers is three black men in their 20s. “They had me cover up my eyes with both hands while we were in the van,” he said.

He said that while the men had used his ATM to withdraw $409 from his account, he was thankful that they “had the humanity not to kill me.”