The sun had just come up Wednesday morning when a man, bloodied and disoriented, emerged from an alley near a Buckhead Village apartment building and pleaded for help.
Two people going about their morning routines were the first he approached on Pharr Road. The 27-year-old had just been kidnapped, he told them. What followed was an extraordinarily harrowing yet fractured account of what happened to him over the course of the five hours the night before.
“Oh my god, he’s in bad shape,” a woman told 911 dispatchers. “He said he was running a couple of hours ago and someone knocked him out and took him!”
The first 911 call was made around 7:40 a.m. from the Bryant at Buckhead Village apartments on Pharr Road, where the woman had been walking and where another man was enjoying a morning workout in the building’s ground-level gym. The victim caught his attention through the glass windows.
With the man bleeding excessively from his head, both callers told dispatchers they were worried he would pass out from blood loss.
“It looks like they cut him up pretty bad,” the second caller said.
According to a newly released police report, the man said he went for a run around 2:30 a.m. near his home at the Elan Madison Yards apartments on Bill Kennedy Way, more than 10 miles from Buckhead Village and not far from Zoo Atlanta. Three men, whom he said he’d never met, then drove up in a black Cadillac pickup truck and surrounded him.
One of them put a cloth over his mouth that smelled so strongly of “vinegar and acetone” that he lost consciousness, the victim told police in the report.
When he regained consciousness, the man found himself in the back seat of the truck, he told police. That is when his alleged captors began to panic as he fought for his freedom, he recounted. At some point, he said he was pistol-whipped by one of the suspects. A police investigator later noted his injuries looked consistent with his account.
The man was eventually able to escape and began running down Pharr Road before turning into a breezeway, where he again lost consciousness, according to the report. It’s not clear how he escaped or for how long he stayed in the breezeway. But when he regained consciousness, he realized he no longer had his cellphone and began trying to flag people down to call 911.
His shoes and wallet had also been taken, the report stated, but the man could not remember if the men in the truck ever demanded anything of him. Investigators noted that his phone pinged in a breezeway next to the Pharr Road apartments, but they were unable to find it.
The man could not provide officers with a detailed description of the suspects. According to the report, he remembered they were armed and spoke in Spanish for the majority of his time in the truck.
An investigator suspected he had suffered a concussion due to his speech and demeanor, and he was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital to be evaluated. As of Friday, police have offered no further updates on the bizarre case as they continue to piece together what really happened over that five-hour window.
