A man in his early 20s was seriously injured and rushed into surgery after he was inadvertently shot while a group of friends played with a gun inside an apartment at Atlantic Station, police said.
The man, who was not identified, remains in the hospital in critical condition, Deputy Chief Charles Hampton with Atlanta police said Thursday afternoon. One man is in custody and charges against him are pending, police said in a news release.
At an afternoon news conference, Hampton and Interim Chief Darren Schierbaum addressed multiple shootings that took place Thursday, several of them fatal. The two high-ranking officers again pleaded with city residents not to reach for guns in anger or carelessness.
“Gunplay is tragic in our city,” Hampton said. “We have the proliferation of guns, and we’re just asking people to be responsible when they’re handling a gun.”
Officers were called to the 17th Street Lofts in Atlantic Station around 12:30 p.m., police said. Inside one of the apartments, a group of friends had been playing with a gun when it fired. The man who was holding the gun as it went off was taken into custody.
Police did not say how many people were in the apartment or provide further details about the circumstances around the shooting. No one involved in the incident has been publicly identified.
The shooting was at least the fifth such incident investigated by Atlanta police Thursday. The first took place during the early morning hours when a man was injured inside his apartment by a stray bullet as dozens of shots were fired in the parking lot of his southeast Atlanta apartment complex.
Another happened around 10:30 a.m. in southwest Atlanta. Officers responded to the 2500 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on a report of shots fired and did not find anything suspicious but were called back to the same location about an hour later for a person shot. During the afternoon news conference, Hampton said officers found a man dead at the scene.
He was later identified as 48-year-old Cheron Wade.
The third incident claimed two lives, according to Hampton. A man in his early 60s was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at Central Park, Hampton said. Not far from the park, a woman in her 60s was found shot dead in the Cosby Spears Memorial Towers. Based on the preliminary investigation, police believe the man was responsible for shooting the woman before turning the gun on himself, Hampton said.
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