Man gets life in prison for 2020 mass shooting at Atlanta ‘street takeover’

A man accused of instigating a 2020 shootout that left two people dead and more than a dozen others injured was sentenced Thursday to life behind bars.

Authorities acknowledged Jerry Emile couldn’t have been the only person who fired a weapon during a Fourth of July “street takeover” and fireworks show in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood.

But he was the only person convicted in what the lead prosecutor called “one of the worst mass shootings in Atlanta history.”

“The defendant sparked a firestorm that did not need to begin,” prosecutor Adriane Love said.

Two people were killed and 14 others were injured the morning of July 5 during the chaotic shootout that started when two cars collided in an intersection along Auburn Avenue, authorities said.

Senior Judge David Emerson heard from the families of 32-year-old Erica Robinson and 20-year-old Joshua Ingram, the two people killed during the exchange of gunfire.

Robinson was an Albany State University graduate who had majored in criminal justice. Ingram was a Georgia State University sophomore and the youngest of eight siblings.

“For reasons I don’t understand, people just started shooting,” Emerson said.

Hundreds of people had gathered that night at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drivers in sports cars did burnouts and doughnuts in while others shot off celebratory fireworks.

Robinson and Ingram were among 157 people killed in Atlanta that year as gun violence spiked during the pandemic. The Fourth of July weekend was a particularly violent one across the city.

Eight-year-old Secoriea Turner had been shot and killed in the backseat of a car hours earlier while riding home from an Independence Day party with her family.

Robinson, who had gone downtown after work, told her mother she would call on the way home. That call never came, a tearful Rosie Robinson told the judge at sentencing.

She described her daughter as funny and sweet, and said she still misses her every day.

Sherlyn Ingram said her son, Joshua, had a smile that “lit every room.”

“When his life was taken, mine was shattered,” she told the judge.

She said her son hugged her every day and that no sentence in the world could bring him back or “return that smile and his embrace.”

Emerson sentenced Emile to two consecutive live sentences, plus an additional 65 years. It was a sentence the defendant’s attorney called “unnecessarily harsh.”

“We have maintained from the very beginning that he never fired a weapon at all,” defense Attorney Olga Izmaylova said after the hearing.

She said Atlanta detectives recovered more than 130 shell casings from the scene that had been fired from various weapons. Based on the prosecution’s case, she said everyone who had a gun that night should have also been charged with murder.

“I just don’t think my client is the right person,” said Izmaylova, noting Emile was also wounded that night.

He was one of three people indicted in the case. But Fulton County prosecutors dropped one man’s charges in late 2022 and a second suspect was acquitted in March 2024.