Police continue search for Virginia-Highland killer

By Ty Tagami and Mike Morris

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta police continued searching Wednesday for suspects in the killing of a man outside a Virginia-Highland apartment.

The murder sent the neighborhood reeling, and police responded with a show of force Tuesday night.

Dozens of officers huddled in the parking lot of the Midtown Promenade shopping center around 7 p.m. before they fanned out into residential areas.

They were seeking any scrap of information about who killed Charles Boyer. They might also have been trying to soothe the frayed nerves of residents.

This was the sixth such mass canvass that the Atlanta Police Department has tried in recent months in the aftermath of a homicide. The residents have typically been receptive, said Lt. Paul Guerrucci, the commander of homicide investigations in Atlanta.

"It's been my experience that they're extremely happy to see the police presence," he said.

Boyer, 39, was shot several times just before 10 p.m. Monday in the parking lot of an apartment building on Virginia Avenue near the intersection with Monroe Drive, according to Atlanta police.

Boyer had been out for drinks with a woman and they had stopped at a nearby convenience store before driving to the apartments where she lived.

The woman, Lisa McGraw, told police that after she got out of the car she felt a gun pressed to her head as two or three masked men asked her to give up the apartment keys and walk to her apartment, Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones said.

They walked a bit, then Boyer and McGraw scattered, with McGraw running over a balcony to seek help. She later told police that she heard gunshots as she ran.

Police found Boyer dead in front of one of the apartment buildings.

The suspects took McGraw’s purse and cell phone and were seen leaving in what witnesses described as a dark-colored sports utility vehicle.

Tuesday night, around 7:30 p.m., the officers who'd been huddling in the nearby shopping center parking lot got into their cruisers, gunned their engines and drove off into the surrounding neighborhoods.

"Every canvass that we've done yielded positive information," Guerrucci said.

None of the prior canvasses occurred in this neighborhood, where petty crimes have been common -- but not random murders.

"A shooting like this changes everything," said Alex Wan, the city councilman who represents the area. "Residents are rightly concerned."

Wan showed up at Midtown Promenade to watch the police organize their hunt. He said his office had fielded dozens of calls Tuesday from worried residents, some who said they were considering selling their homes and moving.

For years, the area has suffered from car break-ins and other property crimes. But violent crimes were relatively rare -- until last summer, when there were a rash of home invasions and robberies, the councilman said. One incident haunted Wan: after a man robbed a couple at gunpoint, he pistol whipped one of the victims.

The police took note of the rising violence, and sent more patrols to Virginia-Highland. Over the past month, Wan said, the robberies all but stopped.

Then came Monday's murder. Now, the police are stepping it up again.

"It's been almost a month since the last robbery. That to me shows success. But what happened last night shows that we have more work to do," Wan said. "I hate that it takes an incident like this to get an increased presence, but I understand there are limited resources."

Though some in the neighborhood are fearful, others are digging in their heels.

John Wolfinger, the public safety chairman for the area's Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU F), said some people wrote on the neighborhood list-serve that they'd had enough and were thinking of moving. But then one resident wrote a stirring call to action.

Wolfinger recalled the message this way: "If you give up and move to Alpharetta," he said, "you let them win."