A Buckhead couple on Monday said they were robbed inside their home over the weekend, held at gunpoint for more than 90 minutes as two masked men demanded jewelry and cash.
It was the second such crime reported in their upscale neighborhood in less than a month, and the third this year.
Atlanta police spokesman Officer Ralph Woolfolk said Monday authorities were investigating a possible connection between all three.
“We obviously feared for our lives,” one of the victims, Mark Mansfield, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Thank God they didn’t shoot us.”
Mansfield said he couldn’t talk much about the specifics of the case, but his girlfriend, Toni Moceri, wrote on Facebook that they were accosted around midnight Saturday after returning to their home on Blackland Road. Moceri said she and Mansfield’s faces were covered while two men clad in all black pointed guns at them and demanded “valuables and cash.”
“Prior to leaving,” Moceri wrote on Facebook, the suspects “left us with specific instructions to follow or they would kill us.”
Woolfolk said jewelry, money, credit cards and a cellphone were stolen.
The case has striking similarities to recent robberies at two other Buckhead homes.
On May 25, two gunmen entered a $3 million mansion on Paces Ridge Road, covered residents' heads with towels and drove one victim to an ATM to force him to withdraw cash. The robbers stole jewelry and "demanded more money by morning and threatened to harm (the) family if demands were not met," police said at the time.
A victim was also driven to an ATM during a Jan. 31 robbery at a home on Randall Mill Road, police said.
Earlier this month, Crime Stoppers Atlanta announced it was offering a $25,000 reward for information in those cases.
While he and Moceri escaped their own ordeal with “just bruises,” Mansfield said he wants his neighbors to know what happened.
“We want everybody alerted that this stuff’s still going on,” he said.
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