Trial highlights when Atlanta abandoned the streets to mayhem
Witness after witness in a murder trial in Fulton County court are dredging up recollections of a shameful episode in the city’s not-so-distant past.
Eight-year-old Secoriea Turner was killed July 4, 2020, when armed goons manning makeshift barricades on an Atlanta street fired on her family’s car when the driver ran the roadblock trying to get home.
The killing occurred near a burned-out Wendy’s on Pryor Road near the former Turner Field. The restaurant was torched three weeks before Secoriea‘s killing and the tragedy was inevitable to just about anyone with half a lick of sense.
Eight bullets from an AR-15-type rifle pierced the family vehicle, including one tearing into the girl’s back. That’s what the City of Atlanta let happen while trying to assuage the feelings and demands of angry protesters.
City officials called the area an “autonomous zone,” a weaselly way of saying “we fled and ceded authority to scary people.”
The trial of Julian Conley, charged with Secoriea’s murder, started last week. Police say he is the trigger man.
A second man, Jerrion McKinney, pleaded guilty this month to aggravated assault and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Atlanta detective Jarion Shephard testified about a dozen armed young men wandered the block that night with guns.
Shephard, the lead investigator on the case, didn’t spot most of those street centurions with his own eyes. He saw them later on security videos shot at the scene. Remember, cops had largely abandoned the area.
In fact, when crime scene investigators arrived after the killing, they had to wait in a nearby staging area as heavily armed cops and armored vehicles cleared the area.
“The autonomous zone was too dangerous for police to go inside,” Shephard told the court. It was a chilling statement: Police determined that a chunk of the city, which they are sworn to protect, was too unsafe for them.
Police allege Conley and McKinney were affiliated with the Bloods street gang and prosecutors said gang members used the occasion to display dominance.
Police at the time were running ragged, having toiled long, tense hours after angry and sometimes destructive protests over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota. Protests hit home June 12, 2020, when Rashard Brooks was shot to death after he fought with cops trying to arrest him on DUI charges outside the Wendy’s.
The next night, crowds burned down the business and then congregated there, marking the charred ruins as a memorial.
Police backed off the scene, worried about clashes with young rifle-toting men. Anarchy filled that vacuum. Gunfights there were not uncommon and at least two others were shot before Secoriea was killed.
Arnold Ragas, one of Conley’s defense attorneys, is using the disorder as a defense, arguing the scene was so screwed up that police grabbed his client because he was one of the few gun-toters they could ID. Conley was wearing a red shirt and a video from a MARTA bus got a good shot of him.
Ragas argued police “provided no protection. They provided no security. They provided no peace. They allowed that area to police itself.”
And when ragtag “guardians” are left to their own devices, bad things happen.
Atlanta detective Jason Teague noted that “people started showing up carrying long guns, walking the area, blocking the street, confronting vehicles. We were told to leave the area.”
Police were held in low esteem at the time, and he said superiors worried about violent “confrontations.”
Later, during cross examination, he said: “Authority was ordered out of the area.”
“You didn’t like that?” a defense attorney asked.
“Not particularly,” he said, echoing what several other cops have told me through the years.
I visited the Wendy’s a week after the arson and had two young men point guns at me when trying to interview the street guardians, and then as we toured the property. I wrote about the absolute insanity of the situation.
So, it was no secret.
A couple of colleagues at the paper took issue with my story, saying I was fanning the flames. Such were the emotions at the time.
Secoriea’s family has sued the city and Wendy’s, saying both abandoned the scene and allowed lawlessness to fester.
The lawsuit states former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms “said police had planned on cleaning the area weeks earlier but were encouraged to wait after Councilmember (Joyce) Sheperd requested more time to ‘negotiate with activists.’”
It was lunacy to negotiate but, again, the summer of 2020 was a different time.
I reached out to Sheperd, who lost a bid for reelection in 2021, and to Bottoms, who left office in 2022 and is now running for governor. Neither camp provided comment.
Video of the burning Wendy’s will no doubt come up frequently in attack ads from Bottoms’ opponents in next year’s election.
Mawuli Davis, one of the attorneys for the girl’s family, chided the city for continuing to fight the case in court, even appealing a judge’s decision not to toss the case.
“This criminal trial only underscores what we have said from the beginning: the City and Wendy’s abandoned the property, abandoned the area and abandoned the citizens who lived nearby,” Davis said in a message. “That neglect created the unsafe conditions that led to Secoriea’s death.”
Again, just about anyone there could see it coming.
About the Author
Bill Torpy, who writes about metro Atlanta for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined the newspaper in 1990.
