Who Mourns The Dead of Brannon Hill

A mass murder occurred last night about a mile from my house. They won't call it such, because the dead are all poor and Black.

At midnight, Duale Ali stood begging at the gates. The yellow crime tape separated him from his home and his heart medication. The tape had been up for about four hours.

Last night, six people were shot at Brannon Hill, a condominium complex near Memorial Drive and Clarkston. At least three died. No one has yet been identified.

Police announced that an arrest had been made a few hours ago. Another suspect remains at large.

Last night, a crowd of men once from Ethiopia or Somalia or Sudan quickly surrounded Ali as he approached a stoic DeKalb County cop, translating hurriedly from Amharic to English as Ali spoke. They pleaded in vain to make an exception and allow him to get to the dilapidated complex, the better to keep the body count at Brannon Hill from rising further last night.

Ali pulled out his wallet at their insistence to show him — and me — his driver’s license. Ali is one hundred years old, born in 1922.

No exceptions.

I suspect nothing they showed him would be. The investigation continued in the distance.

Antsy children sat on the curb. A middle-aged woman in a hijab tried to make herself comfortable in her car, parked in front of the gates, waiting for hours to go home. A funeral home truck drove out of the complex. We held the tape up so cars could pass, ignoring the indignity of the effort.

Indignity is life in Brannon Hill.

A man in his 60’s stood with me behind the yellow tape last night, telling me how he had just been released from Grady after a beating by six men. They wanted his wallet, which had nothing in it. He preferred for me not to publish his name. He knows one of the men who attacked him, and fears reprisal. I have no reason to believe the police could protect him.

More than a dozen assaults at Brannon Hill over the last six months have been reported to the police. Countless more go unreported.

Six months ago, two people looking for a kidnapped baby decided that the best way to obtain the cooperation of poor immigrants at the falling-apart complex would be to form a posse and kick in doors at random. Delarius and Santanta Miller confronted a 60-year-old Somali refugee, Aziz Hassan, during their search. Police say Delarius Miller shot Hassan dead.

No one came back to fix the doors. Residents express shock when anyone fixes anything there. Half the complex is inhabited by squatters, people who cannot find an honest place to live because of their criminal record, drug problems, immigration status or personal destitution. The other half are hanging on by their fingernails.

When I last wrote about Brannon Hill in December, I noted how violence had increased there during the pandemic. “Brannon Hill proper has a murder every four to six months and a robbery or aggravated assault about once every six weeks. With fewer than 500 permanent residents, that’s a murder rate of 400 per 100,000, about 10 times that of Atlanta and 70 times the national average.”

Today, they’re above par.

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The U.S. Department of Justice defines a mass murder as “the killing of three or more people at one time and in one location.” Many gun violence tracking organizations like the Gun Violence Archive define a mass shooting as an event with four or more people shot.

By these standards, Brannon Hill is the scene of a mass shooting and a mass murder.

That said, I’ve long viewed the attention we pay to these events as peculiar and biased. Nearly 25,000 people were murdered last year in America. About 20,000 of those people were murdered with a gun. It isn’t especially rational to privilege attention to the 700 or so Americans who died last year in a mass shooting when about that many people die every ten days in “regular” shootings.

Mass shootings draw more attention when the victims are white, or when the shooting happens in a “safe” (read: white) neighborhood. The murders of Asian spa workers by a sexually-frustrated madman from Atlanta’s affluent suburbs are an aberration. A mass murder outside of Kiss Ultra Lounge on Whitehall Street in Atlanta with three people dead — including a man in a wheelchair — is considered normal enough to fade from memory.

A year ago, six people were shot in front of a smoke shop a few miles away from Brannon Hill, on South Hairston near Redan Road. One man died. That murder remains unsolved. No marches followed in its wake. No broad public outcry for justice and safety arose.

The people standing in the tepid air, waiting to get into their homes last night while police looked as best as they could for a mass murderer, were fully aware of where they stood in the public pecking order.

“I’ll tell you something, if it was one white person” a man joked in the street, “you would see this whole place under siege.”