A woman’s car was stolen at gunpoint by four men Friday morning along a busy stretch of North Highland Avenue in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood, police said.
Officers were called to the 240 block around 6 a.m., Atlanta police said in a news release. The address corresponds to the North Highland Steel apartment complex, a large building that is home to more than a dozen businesses, including Barcelona Wine Bar, multiple medical offices, a gym and more.
A woman told officers she saw four men walking near her car as she tried to get into it, police said. One of the men approached the passenger-side door, brandished a gun and told her to get out, police said. All four men then got into her car and drove away.
The woman was not injured during the incident.
The crime was reminiscent of a killing at Barcelona Wine Bar’s other metro Atlanta location on Howell Mill Road nearly five years ago.
Early one Sunday in November 2017, three men rushed into the West Midtown restaurant as it was closing around 1:45 a.m., police said at the time. The men tied up the restaurant’s employees with electrical tape and forced 29-year-old manager Chelsea Beller to open the safe. When she did, the men shot her in the shoulder, police said.
Beller was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital but died from her wound. In the following months, all four suspects were arrested on a litany of charges, including murder. Samuel Corneilus Ott, Carlous Demar Bailey, Terry Andre Jones and Ira Troy Williams were taken into custody between December 2017 and March 2018, according to online jail records. All of the suspects were between 19 and 21 years old at the time of the shooting.
Ott, Jones and Williams remain in the Fulton County Jail, while Bailey was transferred into the state prison system, according to online records. All four pleaded not guilty to Bender’s murder in May of this year, court records show. The case is still making its way through the courts.
Since Bender’s killing, all Barcelona Wine Bar locations and many other businesses around metro Atlanta have eliminated cash transactions, the AJC reported.
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