Twitter fed DeKalb cookout that ended in shooting

As it turns out, so did hundreds of other teens and young adults. Attendance at the so-called “BigAssCookOut,” a mostly impromptu party near Stone Mountain, ballooned after the word spread by social media. Ultimately, an argument broke out and a couple of men started shooting.

Meeks and her friend, Maya Scott, both 19, were grazed in their heads by a bullet fired into the car they were in. Both women are fortunate they are relatively all right, although no one has been arrested.

But police and experts say the gathering shows the danger of what can happen when young folks advertise a bash in the digital era: Now, a few tweets later, a small party can mushroom into an out-of-control mass gathering.

DeKalb County police were caught off-guard Sunday by the unsanctioned party that ended up with at least 1,000 people milling about the park, a number of them drinking but most just socializing. Police tried to empty the park for two hours before the early-evening shooting, but traffic jams clogged a quick evacuation.

“There wasn’t any drama at first; everyone was just having a good time at the cookout,” said Meeks, who attended a similar event a year earlier. She said maybe 30 or 40 of her friends were there. “But it got shut down because of the public drinking.”

There was only one 911 call from the park that afternoon, for a disorderly juvenile. “It wasn’t like this was a huge disturbance,” Capt. S.R. Fore said.

In response to Sunday's unauthorized party, DeKalb County officials have organized two events where they hope to engage a broad range of community members. The exact origin of Sunday's event is still being investigated by DeKalb police.

“This was a last-minute effort; it was ‘Just do it,’ ” said police Capt. Sonya Porter, who heads the department’s Intelligence-Led Policing unit.

She said the word pretty much spread a day or two before the event mostly on Twitter with the hashtag “BigAssCookOut.” The event was to start at 4:20 p.m., a popular reference for pot users (Sunday was April 20, or 4/20). Meeks said she had known about the event for several weeks.

Porter’s unit will try to monitor the Internet to keep an eye on large gatherings or other “BigAss” events, although keeping tabs on the wide-open digital world, she admits, is a daunting task. For that reason, she asked the public to let police know of large, growing events.

Social media “has changed things drastically,” Porter said. “No one puts out a traditional invitation. With Twitter and Instagram, it’s like 100 times faster. If you go to a party and it is jumping, as they call it, they’ll then text their friends.”

On Tuesday, Wade Walker Park, home to pavilions, tennis courts, walking trails and a massive open field, was quiet. Only a few people meandered about.

Lathan Reigntree, 23, stumbled upon the massive party Sunday. At first, he saw an Easter egg hunt outside the Wade Walker Park Family YMCA, which abuts the park; later in the afternoon, he saw “a river of people rushing into the park.”

Experts say the Twitter-fueled gathering illustrates the incredible power of social media and how such tools can accelerate the speed and size of gatherings.

The Wade Walker event is an extreme example, but David Ryan Polgar, a Connecticut-based lawyer and educator who speaks and writes about our relationship to technology, said the incident highlights the troublesome nature of social media for teens because a message is so easy to disseminate and can have potentially life-altering consequences. The problem, he said, is teens often don’t realize or fully understand the size and scope of their virtual conversations.

Monique Terrell, executive director of Street Smart Youth Project, a nonprofit that works to create safe activities for teens, said teens often don’t realize a situation is spiraling out of control until it’s too late. Last year, a teenage girl she knows got a tweet about a pop-up party at a friend’s house while the parents were out.

“There was this very big number of people in the house,” Terrell said. “And the way it was explained to me is that it wasn’t meant to be so big. It starts out with somebody posting something on their (Facebook) status and then these people invite more people and before you know it, you are no longer in control. Even the kids who orchestrated it feel like it’s outside of their control.”

Terrell recommends parents monitor their teenager’s online chatter and pick their battles. She said it’s normal for teens to want to socialize and want to be a part of something.

“This is an age characterized by impulsivity and social learning, and by not tapping into those realities, that keeps us disconnected by what is very normal about this stage of development,” she said.

Polgar said that with social media constantly changing, old-fashioned parenting techniques may be the way to go.

“If a teenager is looking to ‘hang out’ somewhere cool, it tends not to be where their parents can actively join, or watch, the conversation,” he said. Therefore, parents must talk openly with their kids.

Meeks’ father, who asked he not be named, said he has had the talk with his daughter, “We told them time and again that times are different than when we grew up. Hopefully, she learned from it.”

Social media can be used for young people to do good, such as organizing a volunteer activity, or for mayhem.

What was said to have been planned as an intimate Douglas County house party on the night of Nov. 6, 2010, ballooned — after social media alerts — into a raucous street gathering where 18-year-old Bobby Tillman was stomped to death by four other young men.

Robin Tillman, a volunteer for an upcoming Street Smart Youth Project dance, said she kept an ongoing conversation with her older son about parties. Tillman, who’s no relation to Bobby Tillman, said her son has gone to a couple of parties he learned about through social media but is careful.

“All parties can start and can escalate very quickly,” she said, “and I tell him if it smells like smoke, there’s probably fire.”