A missed ride.
Other factors might’ve been at play, but, in the end, DeKalb County police believe a 21-year-old man died this weekend in an argument over a missed ride, according to a report released Monday.
It happened early Saturday morning at his apartment on Bouldercrest Road. The police report said Charles Rudison was stabbed to death by his roommate, Breyana Davis, 22, after Davis ditched Rudison in downtown Atlanta.
Rudison was a Dacula Publix distribution center employee, his Facebook page said. He’d gone to high school at Gwinnett County’s Mill Creek High and filled the page with contemplations on life and how to be a better man.
Davis called 911 at 3:45 a.m. Saturday to tell how it all ended.
She said she and another friend went downtown with Rudison, according to the report. Rudison and the other friend were angry with Davis after she left, because they had to catch a ride through the Lyft service.
Once they arrived to Ashford East Village apartments, a confrontation ensued. Davis claimed Rudison pushed her down. Then came the blade, an 8-inch-long butcher knife.
The friend who’d been with Davis and Rudison told the story differently.
She said they walked in the apartment and Rudison simply asked Davis why she’d left them.
“At that moment the suspect grabbed a pot of boiling water from the stove and threw it on the victim,” a responding officer wrote. “She then grabbed a knife and stabbed him in the chest.”
Davis said she was going to call 911 “because he had tried to attack her.” That wasn’t true, the witness said.
It took only about 20 seconds from the time the two walked in the apartment to the moment when the blade pierced Rudison’s chest, said the witness, who couldn’t immediately be reached for further comment Monday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
When the officer responded, Rudison lay unconscious on his back on the living room floor. The knife was in the kitchen sink, still bloody, the report said.
Davis was charged with murder and booked in the county jail, where she remained held Monday.
As word spread, friends lamented the death.
“I'm in so much shock right now,” one young woman wrote on Facebook.
She remembered Rudison teasing her in high school with impromptu Ray Charles impressions, singing and moving his head in that clumsy corkscrew.
“I'd give you this look and you'd stop,” she wrote. “But it was still so funny.”
In Rudison’s own posts, he presented an introspective, self-deprecating personality.
“Anyone who knows me knows that my mouth is my biggest asset and flaw.”
“I strive to be a man that finds the beauty of life and peacefully accepting the natural cycles of growth and decay.”
“Nothing’s given to you in life, you have to take it.”
He had few blood relatives in the area and relied on friends.
His last post, on Aug. 20, was on that subject.
The content could seem fitting, considering the reason he was allegedly killed – a disagreement among friends, one feeling left behind by the other.
Rudison wrote that his friends were his family in Georgia and he wanted them to treat him as such.
“So I may come off as a bit sensitive and harsh if I am feeling neglected and left out,” he said, “because you all really don't know how much you mean to me and it hurts that I’m not categorized as the same.”
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