A man has been arrested in connection with a deadly shooting last month at one of southwest Atlanta’s troubled apartment complexes.
Abubacar Diawara, 24, was booked into the Fulton County jail on Wednesday and faces charges of murder and aggravated assault, Atlanta police said. He is accused of shooting and killing 23-year-old Ji Hadd Mwaniki the night of Oct. 22.
According to police, Mwaniki was at the Park at Castleton Apartments along Bent Creek Way when he got into a fight with Diawara that escalated to gunfire. Mwaniki was rushed to a hospital, where he later died.
The complex is about a block from the Alfred Tup Holmes Golf Course along Campbellton Road. It is among 272 of the metro area’s persistently dangerous complexes, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that looked into serious crimes, lax maintenance and other hazards in Atlanta neighborhoods.
Just over 24 hours before Mwaniki was killed, another shooting left a man injured in the same complex. In that case, the 21-year-old victim was in front of a family member’s home when he was shot in the shoulder by someone in a moving vehicle, police said at the time. On Thursday, officials did not immediately return a request to confirm if the two were connected.
In January of last year, three people were shot in what police described as a botched drug deal that resulted in two shooting scenes, one at the complex and one at the nearby Chevron gas station along Campbellton Road at Delowe Drive, the AJC previously reported. And between 2017 and 2021, at least 17 aggravated assaults and three robberies were reported there.
The surrounding neighborhood also has had its share of gun violence.
Most recently, a 25-year-old father was shot and killed in front of his children Wednesday while at the Campbellton Road gas station. In January 2022, a 5-year-old was grazed by a stray bullet after getting caught in the crossfire between two drivers in the 1800 block of Campbellton Road. Two men were arrested in that shooting.
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