AJC Podcast: Inside the Dangerous Dwellings investigation

April 11, 2023 Atlanta: Residents of a troubled southwest Atlanta apartment complex were rattled Tuesday morning, April 11, 2023 after police found a woman shot to death in a breezeway. A neighbor’s 911 call took Atlanta police to the City Park Atlanta apartments on Fairburn Road in the Wildwood neighborhood around 4:30 a.m. Officers found the victim dead of an apparent gunshot wound on the second floor of one of the buildings, police Lt. Ryan Stephens told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the scene. Her name was not released. Investigators are still trying to determine whether the victim, who was transgender, lived at the complex or was visiting someone, but they believe the altercation began inside an apartment, Stephens said. No other details were immediately available Tuesday, he said, as the investigation is in the early stages. The complex, formerly Elite at City Park, was among 275 of the metro area’s persistently dangerous complexes, according to the AJC’s “Dangerous Dwellings” investigation that looked into serious crimes, lax maintenance and other hazards in Atlanta neighborhoods. Sara Clark, who has lived at City Park since 2019, told the AJC that violence in the complex has not interrupted her daily life until Tuesday. She said her corner of the apartment community is usually quiet. Clark moved to Atlanta from North Philadelphia in search of a safer environment, and she was shocked to wake up to a full-blown homicide investigation. Despite the violence, Clark said she still feels safer than in Philadelphia. “Since I been here in four years, I never had nothing like that this close,” she said. “I work from home, so I’m always in the house, but coming out to walk my daughter to the door early in the morning and see something like this? It’s shocking and it’s very sad.” Between 2017 and 2022, police have recorded 106 crimes at the address, including 27 aggravated assaults, four robberies, a rape, one incident of sodomy and a case of child molestation. Since then, at least three other shootings have taken place at the complex. In December 2022, a man was critically injured in a shooting near the front entrance. In July of the same year, another man was shot. And in February, several shots were fired at an officer during an incident involving a suspected stolen vehicle. (John Spink / John.Spink@ajc.com)