SUSPECTED SERIAL KILLER
Police say gun evidence links Aemon Presley, 34, in three shooting deaths since late November. He could be a suspect in a fourth death. Below is a timeline of the alleged crimes.
- Nov. 23: Dorian Jenkins, 42, who earned the nickname "Sidewinder" because he drags his foot, was found dead four days before Thanksgiving at the intersection of Courtland Street and Ralph McGill Boulevard in Atlanta. He was wrapped in blankets, concealing the five bullets pumped into his body at close range.
- Nov. 26: Tommy Mims, 68, also known as "Can Man," was discovered shot to death near a recycling center on Whitehall Street in Atlanta. Mims was shot seven times. He earned his nickname from collecting and recycling cans.
- Dec. 6: Karen Pearce, 44, was found shot to death behind One Decatur Town Center in downtown Decatur. The Smyrna hairdresser's body was discovered after witnesses heard gunshots.
A FOURTH SHOOTING
- Sept. 27: Calvin Gholston, 54, was found shot to death in a breezeway at the Spring Mill Village shopping center on Memorial Drive in unincorporated Decatur. Channel 2 Action News reported Monday that police were set to charge Presley in that killing.
On the next to last day of 2013, Aeman Presley posted something atypical on his Facebook page, otherwise filled with selfies, head shots and banal pronouncements about his day-to-day existence as a struggling actor in Los Angeles.
In a rambling polemic, filled with grammatical and punctuation errors, the 34-year-old suspected serial killer declared, “We are all gods capable of good and evil … and can do whatever we want on Earth. Whether it be good or evil because thats the divine right we were given.”
Investigators say Presley, a father of two, chose the dark side. He has been charged in the deaths of two homeless men and a Cobb County hairstylist. On Monday, Channel 2 Action News, citing law enforcement sources, reported Presley also will be charged in the Sept. 27 shooting of 54-year-old Calvin Gholston in a breezeway at Spring Mill Village shopping center on Memorial Drive in unincorporated Decatur.
The victims he’s alleged to have chosen were particularly vulnerable. Gholston’s killer likely didn’t know that he suffered from schizophrenia, but the others had little or no opportunity to defend themselves. Dorian Jenkins and Tommy Mims were asleep on Atlanta’s streets when they were killed within three days of each other during Thanksgiving week. Karen Pearce, described as petite and unfailingly polite, was confronted and shot while walking alone to her car in downtown Decatur on Dec. 6 after a dinner date with friends.
Terms like “sinister” and “brutal” were used by investigators to describe the slayings. Mims, for example, was shot seven times with a revolver that has a capacity of no more than six rounds.
“Someone had to reload the gun in order to get seven rounds in him,” Atlanta Police Homicide Detective David Quinn said at a press conference last week.
On the surface, there’s little beyond a 2003 conviction in Rockdale County for terroristic threats and criminal damage to suggest Presley’s transformation into the soulless killer he’s accused of being.Until recently, he resided in Los Angeles, where he moved in 2010 to pursue his dream of acting.
“I just realized this weekend while I was swimming at Venice beach that im here and in life im HAPPY!!!” he wrote in 2010. “Thats all that matters at the end of the day.”
While still in Atlanta, the Stone Mountain High School graduate was represented by the Houghton Talent Agency, which on Monday declined comment. Presley appeared in two locally shot, low-budget urban action movies, “Exit” and “Rules.”
The director of both films, Taveras Wilson, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an email that Presley was merely a “background performer/extra at best,” adding, “I did not know him personally nor can I recall very much of him from those movies.”
Once in Los Angeles, Presley had little luck breaking into show business, though last year he wrote that he was “relaxing in my life nowaday cooling down calming down and collecting mysef after going threw all the changes and growing pains that Ive been through as a younger black man. Im also getting my money right for once and for all.”
He used some of that money to sign up for acting classes at the Margie Haber Studio in Beverly Hills.
“So many Bad actresses in my acting class in Beverly Hills!!! Hope to meet my future wifey. Lol,” he wrote on Facebook in January.
A representative from the studio said instructors there did not remember Presley offhand.
Work was scarce, and Presley didn’t appear to be choosy about roles.
In a caption accompanying one of his headshots, he wrote, “Its for badboy parts. A lotta people luv it. Everybody might not be feelin it. They problem not mine. Long as these people in Hollywood buy It. And buy me. And cut a check.”
But money was running low, Presley confessed in one exchange. If he had a social life, he never wrote about it, instead posing for dozens of selfies that showed him smoking marijuana or drinking.
One of the last photos he posted, on Jan. 9, included this eeriest of captions: “Killer.”
He would not post again until August 27. It was another selfie of Presley, looking grim, his head cocked, wearing a dark shirt with what appears to be a black hoodie — similar to what witnesses to the shootings of Mims and Jenkins told police the perpetrator was wearing.
“Where have u been what u been up to?” asked one friend who had once regularly corresponded with Presley. He did not respond.
Exactly one month later, according to police, he claimed his first victim.
Thursday, he was arrested by MARTA police at the Georgia State rail station after attempting to jump the fare gates without paying. A loaded revolver and a box of ammunition were found on him matching the weapon police believe was used in the shooting of the two homeless men.
Presley is being held without bond at the Fulton County Jail. Atlanta police have thus far declined comment on their investigation.
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