A 26-year-old man who was on Atlanta's Most Wanted list was arrested in Detroit Thursday, six months and one day after he allegedly shot and killed a 16-year-old girl in southwest Atlanta, officials said.
Dwight Lewis, who is charged with murder in the killing of Keosha Tinch, was arrested without incident, the FBI said in a statement. He is in a jail in Detroit awaiting extradition back to Atlanta.
Atlanta police said Tinch was sitting in the back seat of an SUV outside an apartment complex on Campbellton Road on Feb. 2 when a man emerged, armed with a semiautomatic handgun. The man, who police believe was Lewis, began firing at the car. Several bullets hit the girl, including a fatal shot to her head. No one else in the SUV was injured.
At 16, the DeKalb County teen was the youngest victim of homicide in the city of Atlanta this year, records show.
The girl’s mother, Kenya Tinch, spent most of this week in bereavement, since Wednesday was the six-month anniversary of Keosha’s death. She would have started her last year of high school next week, with hopes of graduating and joining the military, her mother said.
“She was like the life of my party, my world,” Kenya Tinch told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I basically lost everything.”
She does not believe the shooter was specifically aiming for her daughter — in fact, the girl shouldn’t even have been in the car at the time. That night, Keosha had sneaked out of her house while her mother wasn’t home.
“The bond and the relationship that we had is so unbreakable,” Kenya Tinch said. “She was just being hard-headed that one day; she didn’t listen.”
Tinch believes Lewis knew some of the other people who were in the car at the time.
The past six months, she said, finding her daughter’s killer had been her No. 1 priority.
“The only that that (was) on my mind … is getting this boy,” she said. “I think about my baby every day; sometimes all day long.”
Keosha had three brothers and three sisters, all of whom dealt with the loss differently, Kenya Tinch said.
“She wanted to go into the military. She just wanted to travel … that was a happy kid,” she said. “And they took her away from me.”
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