Beneath the streets and now above, Atlanta can’t take a break

Two hours later, a mentally ill man allegedly hijacked a bus, took passengers hostage and killed a man before embarking on a wild chase straight out of the 1990s movie “Speed.”

Police Chief Darin Schierbaum was quick to note that the suspects had lengthy criminal records. The suspected mall shooter had already been arrested 11 times. The alleged hijacker was 19. It’s almost an APD job description to complain about the revolving door of the justice system.

Credit: John Spink/AJC

Credit: John Spink/AJC

After the first shooting, Joseph Eric Grier, 39, spoke to a group of reporters wearing a moth-bitten T-shirt, saying he had witnessed the crime. He talked frantically and nonsensically – about his banking activities, his height (6 feet 5 inches, 225 pounds), his criminal past, his inmate number, his parole officer, his inability to own a handgun due to his criminal past and that he was bipolar and no longer taking medication.

“I’m currently in a manic episode,” he said.

Speaking to reporters, he talked about the shooter in the food court: “I’m bigger than that guy. He has a little gun that won’t do anything, I’ll take that from him.

About 30 minutes later, police say, that’s exactly what he did. Grier boarded a Gwinnett County bus a few blocks away and allegedly fought with a passenger who pulled out a gun. Grier took the gun during the struggle, shot him and “ordered the bus driver to flee the scene while threatening the passengers with the gun,” the GBI said.

The passenger, Ernest Byrd, 58, was the father of seven children and grandfather of as many. By a heartbreaking coincidence, he worked with people struggling with mental illness, his family said.

This wild and tragic afternoon highlighted all sorts of issues that cities need to address: violent crime, mental illness, perceptions of inner cities, recidivism, gun ownership, petty conflicts that escalate into violence. Even public transport.

Credit: Miguel Martínez

Credit: Miguel Martínez

“I think mental health is at stake,” Dickens told reporters last week.

“You’re talking about a person who knows they have a mental health issue, so that comes into the conversation,” he added. “How can we, as a society, deal with people with mental illness? »

This, Mr. Mayor, is a distressing question that has always tormented humanity. And downtown Atlanta has more than its share of troubled and disturbed people.

The Peachtree Center shooting happened after 34-year-old Jeremy Malone got into an altercation with a stranger. Malone then allegedly shot the man and then injured two older women, police said, before being shot by an off-duty Atlanta police officer who was working there.

Malone, a short man known as “Kutthroat,” is said to be considered a mutt by criminals. He was convicted of robbery at the age of 17, leading to his incarceration for seven years.

Since then, he has been in and out of jail, facing charges including theft, drug possession, reckless driving, aggravated assault, threatening a woman with a knife and being a felon in possession of a firearm .

Last year, Malone pleaded guilty to the latter offense and was sentenced to prison by a DeKalb County judge because he had already been incarcerated — on and off — for about a year on that charge, reported WSB-TV.

WSB said Malone was charged in December in Fulton for allegedly threatening a woman with a knife. He was released on bail last week.

Grier has been in trouble for 20 years, beginning with a child molestation conviction in 2005, one for aggravated assault three years later and another in 2011, according to state prison records. He was released at the end of 2014.

A relative told news crews that Grier, who was college-educated, could be a kind and stable person. When he takes his medication.

But his arrest record shows he is a troubled, even dangerous, person.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

In 2017, he was arrested in DeKalb for indecent exposure and another time for domestic violence.

In 2018, he was arrested for violating a restraining order and spent five months in Fulton Jail after being ordered to take anger management classes and stay away from his victim.

In 2019, he was arrested in Atlanta for aggravated battery. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months (he did 15) and three and a half years of probation, ordered to participate in a drug program and to avoid his two victims.

In 2023, Grier was arrested with a gun in DeKalb and served another three months.

Now he’s back, probably forever.

Dickens says last week’s tragedy and chaos is another wake-up call for society to tackle mental illness and the criminals who don’t pay attention to it.

But rebuilding a long-decaying water system, a billion-dollar-plus repair, will, oddly enough, be easier.

With that, you map the network, develop engineering plans, apply for grants from the federal government, ask residents for more money, and then get to work.

It will be difficult, no doubt. But the other problem is much more endemic.