Atlanta police are investigating after a member of Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ jail task force and his wife were carjacked at gunpoint early Tuesday.
Steven Muhammad said he and his wife had just finished volunteering for this weekend’s Sweet Auburn Festival when two men armed with assault-style rifles approached them in a southwest Atlanta parking lot.
“When we got out, two guys were running toward us with rifles in their hands,” Muhammad told AJC.com on Wednesday. “We froze. They were 30 feet away when we saw them. With two of them, there wasn’t no sense to run. We just stood there.”
The minister and his wife were “outmanned and outgunned,” so they handed over their cellphones, car keys and $240 in cash, according to an Atlanta police incident report.
The carjacking occurred shortly after midnight at an apartment complex off Greenbriar Parkway.
“Basically, they were happy I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket,” Muhammad said. “They were young, probably about 18, and they had bandannas covering their faces.”
The men then jumped into the gray 2019 Dodge Durango that Muhammad rented to prepare for the festival and took off.
The entire encounter was witnessed by an ambulance driver who was sitting in the parking lot at the time, according to the report. He told police he saw the men get out of a “blacked out” sedan with their rifles before robbing the couple.
In July, Muhammad was appointed to the mayor's 25-member jail task force that will make suggestions for repurposing the Atlanta City Detention Center and ending the facility's role of housing inmates.
RELATED: Atlanta city jail to close, task force will decide its future
“We’ve been talking about these kinds of things, but I’ve never experienced it,” Muhammad said, adding that looking down the barrels of two rifles gave him a new perspective to take back to his committee.
He said historically, he’s been in favor of “coddling” Atlanta’s inmates and helping them in any way he can.
“I still want to help them,” he said Wednesday, “but I’m probably not as mushy about it ... Things could have ended differently.”
MORE: Atlanta city jail task force has 9 months to give Bottoms suggestions
Muhammad said he and his wife were shaken up by the incident, but are doing OK.
Anyone with information about the armed robbery and carjacking is asked to contact Atlanta police.
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