Stopped in Traffic

It was a week ago Friday. I had left the office around 5:30. It had been a tough week and we were planning to go out to dinner. The traffic was horrendous -- southbound cars on Johnson Road were backed up onto Briarcliff. I thought that there must have been an accident. I called Tom to tell him it was going to take me a while to get home, that I had never seen Johnson Road backed up like this. It was very slow going; cars turned left or right at side streets or turned around and headed north. I turned right on East Rock Springs when I had a chance, and then was home.

Google Maps traffic showed Highland in red all the way to Ponce de Leon. We took another route to Caramba, on Monroe, where there was traffic but not the bumper-to-bumper, not-really-moving kind of traffic that was on Highland; it was more the normal Friday evening kind of traffic.

I didn't see it until later, but there had been an email earlier:

APD on scene of shooting RT @emseaelle: @ajc why is the intersection of briarcliff and ponce closed off?

That was followed by another email, describing a white Mazda at the northeastern corner of Briarcliff and Ponce, with a blanket-covered body and bullet holes in the side of a car. Springdale Park Elementary had gone into lockdown mode, and children reported seeing a man running with a gun.

There was only a little more (or a little less) information than that in the AJC story that came out that evening. The victim, whose name had not yet been released, had been northbound on Moreland Avenue and stopped at the traffic light at Ponce. (North of Ponce, the street is Briarcliff; south of Ponce, the street is Moreland. I suspect this name change has something to do with Atlanta’s racial history, but I don’t know this for a fact.) While he was stopped at the light, multiple suspects in possibly two vehicles approached his car. There was gunfire; the victim’s car proceeded across Ponce before coming to a stop at the northeast corner of the intersection. The suspects were gone, and the man in the car was dead.

That was all the news that was available over the weekend. Was it a dispute among a group of people that ended badly, or was it random? The idea that a man could be murdered while sitting in a car at a red light not far from Springdale Park Elementary School at 4 o’clock in the afternoon was very disturbing. It could have been a mother on her way to pick up her kids, a man who left work early to make it to his son’s soccer game, a woman on an evening shift on her way to work, a man on the way to the grocery store. It could have been any of us, and we could have had our children with us in the car.

I went to the MLPA board meeting Monday night, and although I got there a few minutes late I did get there in time to hear the end of the security update – the police thought that the victim was targeted by the perpetrators and it wasn’t a random act. We were all glad to hear that, as we didn’t think that people that we knew were likely to shoot us at the corner of Moreland and Ponce de Leon.

On Tuesday, the police released the name of the man who had been killed. His name was Graham Stephen Sisk. He was from Atlanta, and he was 23 years old. On Thursday, the police released surveillance video. The incident that culminated in the shooting might have started “several miles down the road,” but the police wouldn't speculate as to motive. A witness, afraid to give her name, said that a black pickup truck stopped, and a man got out, and shot the man in the white car.

At the MLPA meeting, the speaker said that the homicide was being investigated by an experienced team of officers. There were a lot of people who saw this happen; I hope they could and did provide useful information to the police. It should not be possible to walk up to a car at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, stopped at a traffic light, and shoot someone, and get away with it.  Not in my neighborhood -- not in anyone's neighborhood.