Four people were recovering from gunshot wounds Thursday after a pair of overnight shootings outside businesses in downtown Atlanta and south Fulton County.
Robbery was the apparent motive in the Wednesday night shooting outside a closed bar at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Bell Street, that sent two men to the hospital with gunshot wounds.
Atlanta police Capt. Tim Peek told Channel 2 Action News that the intended robbery victim was shot in the elbow, and another person who “just happened to be in the area” was shot in the torso.
The victims were taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, and are expected to survive, according to Channel 2.
Natosha Jones lives in the 200 block of Auburn Avenue, which is on the route of the under-construction Atlanta streetcar project.
“It was close to midnight, I heard six shots,” Jones said. “It sounded like a cannon, like it was coming from a huge gun.”
Jones said that when she looked out her third-floor window to see what was going on, “I saw three people running down the street and heard people screaming.”
She said that while shootings aren’t frequent on Auburn Avenue, “I won’t say that it’s unusual.”
With the streetcar project progressing, city officials “need to clean up the area so that it will be safe for people to come down here and people to feel comfortable,” Jones told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I think Auburn Avenue has gotten a bad reputation over the years but is a beautiful historical area that needs to be revitalized.”
About an hour after the Auburn Avenue incident, a shooting outside a south Fulton restaurant also wounded two people.
That shooting happened outside the International African Market on Old Bill Cook Road.
Witnesses told Channel 2 that three masked men started shooting, then ran away.
The conditions of the two people shot were not immediately available.
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