A security guard has been arrested and charged in the shooting death of a colleague early Thursday in the lobby of a Buckhead office building.
Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones said 26-year-old Dexter Harper was charged with murder and taken to the Fulton County Jail.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office identified the dead guard as Emmanuel C. Nwankwo, 23, of Riverdale.
Police have not revealed a motive for the shooting, which happened about 5 a.m. in an office tower in the 3300 block of Peachtree Road that houses numerous businesses, including the Buckhead Center of Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business and several realty offices.
“We have two security guards who were working here at this location,” Atlanta police Lt. Charles Hampton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re not sure what the motive was. We’re being told there may have been some type of verbal argument that escalated to the gunfire.”
The man identified Thursday afternoon as Nwankwo appeared to have been shot multiple times and died at the scene, where police recovered a handgun, Hampton said.
Harper was taken to police headquarters for questioning before police charged him in Nwankwo’s death.
Police cordoned off the entrance to the building, which was closed to tenants for hours. The crime scene tape was taken down about 9:30 a.m.
The building, formerly known as Tower Place 200 and now called 3348 Peachtree, is “back open for business,” said John Barton, a spokesman for building manager Parkway Properties.
“We’re cooperating very fully with the investigation,” he said.
Mackenzie Crabtree, who has worked in an office in the building for two years, said she didn’t know the security guards involved very well.
“You see them in passing,” she said. “You say hey to everybody every day. They help you if you have packages and stuff like that.”
She said she had not heard about the shooting before she got to work Thursday morning.
“This is so unbelievable to me,” Crabtree said. “I feel really, really bad about this. It’s really freaking me out.”
