Self-defense hearing concludes for ex-Atlanta officer charged with murder

Atchison, a 21-year-old father of two, was wanted for allegedly stealing a woman’s cellphone at gunpoint, but he did not have a weapon on him when he was killed, investigators found.

The Black man’s fatal shooting sparked protests in Atlanta and policy changes within the city’s police department after it was revealed that federal task force members were not allowed to wear body cameras.

Credit: Christina Matacotta

Credit: Christina Matacotta

In the wake of Atchison’s killing, the Atlanta Police Department withdrew its officers from federal task forces. Those partnerships resumed after a change in federal policy allowing local task force officers to wear body cameras.

Several current and former task force members testified that Atchison hid under a pile of clothes and ignored officers’ commands to surrender after leading them on a chase through three separate apartments in a northwest Atlanta complex.

Kim, the closest officer to the closet where Atchison was hiding, shot the wanted man in the face after agents said Atchison quickly raised his arm in a threatening manner.

“I believed he was raising a gun,” said special agent Matthew Winn, one of several law enforcement officers tasked with finding Atchison nearly six years ago and arresting him.

“It happened so fast I didn’t have time to shoot,” Winn said on the stand, adding he would have fired his gun if Kim hadn’t shot Atchison first. “It is my opinion that he posed a deadly threat when he raised his hand.”

Kim retired from the Atlanta Police Department months after the deadly shooting. He was indicted in late 2022 on charges of felony murder, aggravated assault, involuntary manslaughter and two counts of violating his oath of office.

Former Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard had said he was prepared to seek charges against Kim in March 2020, but that became impossible after COVID-19 suspended virtually all grand jury proceedings in the state for more than a year.

When current DA Attorney Fani Willis took office the following year, she said her staff was working through a “large backlog” of police use-of-force incidents. She has since indicted numerous current and former law enforcement officers in years-old cases.

Kim’s attorney, Don Samuel, successfully had his client’s case moved to federal court last year, citing the former officer’s role with the FBI’s Atlanta Metropolitan Major Offender Task Force. Kim has pleaded not guilty.

Brian Watkins, head of the Fulton DA’s Civil Rights Division, asked several task force officers whether they could have called in a SWAT team or a police K-9 to help them take Atchison into custody.

Each said they had conducted hundreds of fugitive apprehensions, if not thousands, and testified that they followed their training. Kim did not testify at his self-defense hearing, but his former colleagues said he had no way of knowing whether Atchison had a weapon.

“Sung Kim did what he was trained to do,” said Atlanta police investigator Mason Mercure. “No officer wants to be in that situation.”

Even the state’s use-of-force expert, a retired law enforcement officer from New Mexico, said he believed the shooting was justified given Atchison’s sudden movements inside the closet.

But Nicholas Bloomfield said the task force’s decision to enter the apartment instead of calling in reinforcements was “unreasonable and tactically unsound.”

“The officers had time on their side (and) they could have reasonably employed other options,” he said.

Both sides were instructed to submit supplemental briefs by January before U.S. District Judge Michael Brown makes his decision.