There’s not much of Mary Dang’s life that wasn’t shaped in some way by her little sister, Mitchel.
Born just 22 months apart, it’s always been Mary and Mitchel, childhood playmates turned best friends who relied on each other even as their adult lives took turns of their own. On Wednesday, what would have been Mitchel Dang’s 26th birthday, her grieving family planned to gather at the skating rink in Lilburn where she learned to skate as a kid and to light lanterns in remembrance.
Mitchel Dang was killed Aug. 27 after leaving a music venue in downtown Atlanta, authorities said, and her body was not discovered until three days later. Her family believes the man arrested last week on murder charges was merely “a stranger in the night.”
“We’ve gone over the scenario a million times,” Mary Dang told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, still struggling to make sense of her sister’s death. “We can only hope and pray for the truth (to be revealed), and hope that justice be served in the fullest capacity.”
Mitchel Dang loved love, her sister said, describing her as a hopeless romantic. She named her rescue terrier Valentine, and he’d often join the sisters on walks or hikes. Mary, 27, Mitchel, 25, and youngest sister Maggie, 16, did most things “just the three of us,” the oldest sister said.
All three lived with their parents in Gwinnett County, where Mitchel graduated from Berkmar High School. Their parents immigrated from Vietnam right after the war, settling in Lilburn and working hard to create a new life here, Mary Dang said.
Credit: Courtesy/Family Photo
Credit: Courtesy/Family Photo
“We didn’t have much,” she said, describing the lean early years. “I had my sister and she had me, and we were never alone.”
For a while after her high school graduation, Mitchel worked in the restaurant industry and took courses in hospitality at Gwinnett Tech. She found her true passion working as a lash technician at a boutique in Sandy Springs and was focused on personal growth, her sister said.
Mary Dang remembers a normal evening at home on the Saturday night before her sister disappeared. They had dinner together, and Mitchel asked their mother if she could spend time with friends. They were going to the Alley Cat Music Club on Lower Alabama Street, a bar that regularly hosts house and techno DJs and dance parties.
Mitchel loved to dance, her sister said.
“She wasn’t afraid to be her true self,” Mary Dang said. “She didn’t care about what people thought about her and she made absolutely certain to speak her truth. Anyone who encountered her, she would hope that for them as well.”
Mitchel didn’t come home that night. For a few days, the family wasn’t too concerned they hadn’t heard from her, assuming the 25-year-old was staying with friends and taking some time for herself. It wasn’t until Atlanta police knocked on the family’s door Aug. 30 that their reality shattered.
Mitchel’s body was found at about 8 that morning in a parking deck on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, one block south of the music club. Mary Dang said her sister’s car was parked in a different deck, and she doesn’t know how her body ended up there.
The family has more questions than answers about Mitchel’s final moments. Ja’Keivious Arnold, 24, has been accused of robbery, kidnapping and murder in her death, which occurred sometime between midnight Aug. 27 and 8 a.m. Aug. 30. An investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office said Wednesday the results of an autopsy are still pending.
Her cellphone was stolen, according to Arnold’s arrest warrants, which did not provide a manner of death other than “homicidal violence.” He was identified as a suspect through surveillance footage, according to the Dang family, and is being held without bond in the Fulton jail.
Arnold has been arrested on robbery charges before. When he was 17, he was charged after a boy at Creekside High School was accosted in a bathroom and his cellphone was stolen, court records show.
That case was not formally charged until February 2020 and eventually became one of many stuck in a logjam exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2022, Judge Ural Glanville signed off on a state motion to drop the robbery charge against Arnold, citing several years of inaction and lack of interest by the victim, records show.
Arnold’s arrest Friday in Dang’s case is his first in Fulton since then, according to online records. Mary Dang said the arrest has brought some peace to her family, but there’s no sense of closure. Part of her is waiting for Mitchel to walk back in after work or a run, arms full of ingredients for the next adventurous dish she planned to cook her family.
“It’s so strange, because we still hope for her to come to the door,” Mary Dang said. “To be able to put a face to this person (Arnold) makes it more real somehow.”
Credit: Courtesy/Family Photo
Credit: Courtesy/Family Photo
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