More than two months after an investigation was botched by Clayton County police, a suspect is facing a murder charge after he was arrested in an unrelated incident in another county, officials said.
On Friday, Clayton detectives took out warrants for murder and aggravated assault against Kevin Flowers, who was arrested in Bibb County, police said. A spokeswoman said Clayton police did not know what charges Flowers is facing in Bibb, and he no longer appears in the jail’s online inmate list.
Flowers is accused of killing 77-year-old Ivan Millman at his home in Ellenwood. According to his daughter, Gahra Wright, Millman was severely beaten and then suffered multiple strokes and a seizure when he was taken to the hospital July 26. He was placed on life support that night and moved to hospice care Aug. 4, then died four days later.
The case was not investigated by detectives until Aug. 7, when a cleaning crew hired by Wright contacted police to report that the inside of Millman’s home was likely a crime scene. Wright said detectives had not been aware of Millman’s case before.
The issue appeared to stem from the uniformed officers’ initial response to Millman’s home. Millman and Flowers, who knew one another, met with officers outside the house, Wright said. She later learned that while Millman was clearly injured and could barely speak, he and Flowers both told police that the 77-year-old had been mugged in downtown Atlanta.
Officers did not enter the house and apparently took the two men’s reports at face value, according to Wright. They called an ambulance for Millman and allowed Flowers to leave the area. As Wright continued to pursue the investigation while her father was in the hospital, she said she was repeatedly told that the assault happened outside the jurisdiction of Clayton police.
Flowers was booked into the Bibb jail Wednesday, police said, and a detective traveled to Macon to interview him again. Flowers’ description of the circumstances around Millman’s injuries and death was inconsistent with the information he’d provided on July 26, leading the detective to secure arrest warrants against him.
After Millman’s death, police said they opened an internal investigation into the handling of the case. It remained open at the time of Flowers’ arrest, a department spokeswoman said.
“It’s a little bit of pressure lifted off of me,” Wright said. “There’ll never be full closure because I don’t have my dad, but I’m glad (Flowers) won’t be able to do this to anyone else, and another family won’t have to go through what our family has.”
Wright said she filed a complaint with the police department and hopes someone will be held accountable by the internal investigation for the mistakes made in her father’s case.
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