A gang member implicated in the January 2009 fatal shooting of a popular Grant Park bartender turned up at Grady Memorial Hospital early Tuesday morning with multiple gunshot wounds, Atlanta police confirmed.
Twenty-year-old Johnquavious Hood offered police no details about who shot him, or why.
“He said he was walking on Ralph David Abernathy when he was shot, but would not provide responding investigators with any further information,” APD spokesman Carlos Campos said. “He is alive and able to speak, and it is being investigated like any other shooting in which the victim doesn’t cooperate.”
Hood was released from Georgia State Prison in Reidsville on Dec. 14 for offenses unrelated to the bar shooting, which galvanized Atlantans already on edge following a wave of similarly brazen crimes.
Prosecutors said they believed Hood fired the head shot that killed 27-year-old John Henderson, but they lacked the physical evidence to charge the 30 Deep gang member. One witness told police that Hood, then 18, told her he had killed the Standard Food and Spirits bartender.
But Hood allegedly told police in a videotaped interrogation that Jonathan Redding killed Henderson. Redding, who was 17 at the time of the crime, was eventually charged under a law that allows a jury to convict a defendant for murder if he participated in an armed robbery that resulted in a death. He was convicted and sentenced to life plus 20 years in March 2011 for his role in the bartender’s death.
Fulton County prosecutor Lance Cross said Hood, fearful of being labeled a “snitch,” backtracked once he came face-to-face with Redding in court.
Whether Hood is persona non grata with 30 Deep is almost irrelevant now, as the gang, decimated by criminal prosecutions, is no longer viewed as a force on the Mechanicsville and Pittsburgh streets it once ruled, police said.
“It’s a sad life in the underworld he traveled,” said Don Henderson, who also is convinced that Hood killed his son.
The retired church organist, who lives in Maryland, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday that he “didn’t know how to feel” about Hood’s shooting.
“I don’t think anyone deserves to die before their time,” Henderson said. “I really don’t have any personal feelings for him at all. I’m only interested that he doesn’t return to a life of crime.”
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