He didn’t know her by name, but Ronald Stevens recognized his neighbor on sight. She lived directly upstairs. They’d occasionally bump into each other in the parking lot of Walton Crossing apartments in Austell.
“I’d say, ‘How you doing?’” Stevens said Tuesday. “She’d holler, ‘I’m blessed!’”
Cobb County police have identified her as Kisha S. Holmes, 35. Investigators say she killed her three children — a 9-month girl and two boys, 4 and 10 — before taking her own life inside their second-floor apartment on Mulkey Road. They said nothing about how they died, or how long they may have been dead. The children’s names were not released.
A maintenance worker entered their apartment Tuesday morning and discovered the bodies, police said. He called officers just before 10 a.m. to report a crime scene at the complex, near the East West Connector and WellStar Cobb Hospital in south Cobb County.
The Cobb County Medical Examiner will conduct autopsies, investigators said.
News of the deaths swept the apartments, leaving residents stunned and fearful. It’s the second death investigation at the complex in less than six months, though the cases are not related.
On Sept. 20, Tavin E. Campbell, 24, of Marietta, was shot to death inside a Walton Crossing apartment. Two days later, police in Florida arrested a suspect, Orain Patterson, 27, in northern Miami.
Tuesday afternoon, as people returned to the gated complex, they saw the police cars, the TV news trucks, and knew something bad had happened again. They soon found out what.
“I woke up today, and I heard all this craziness going on,” one resident, Xavier Villalba, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “But no one heard anything.”
Villalba said maintenance workers doing routine work on dryers and were going door to door Tuesday morning. After the family was found dead, complex management handed out flyers to residents stating that the residents had died, Villalba said.
“It made me angry,” Villalba said. “There were four sentences, but no details on what happened.”
Stevens had a feeling something was wrong in the apartment upstairs. He’d gotten used to hearing thumps in the ceiling when the children were banging around in the unit above his.
“For the past few days,” he said, “it’s been quiet up there.”
About the Author
