Illustration by Marella Moon Albanese
Lolita Griffeth was only saying goodbye for a few days. Her boyfriend really didn’t want her to go. But Griffeth told him she’d been offered a temporary apartment—a pathway out of homelessness, out of the tent she and Cornelius Taylor had been living in on Old Wheat Street in Sweet Auburn.
“I told him, ‘Baby, let me go ahead and try to get us a place to live.’” She stops, tears welling in her eyes. “I said, ‘I know where to find you when I come back.’”
But by the time Griffeth came back just days later, he was dead.
Cornelius Taylor, 46, was killed on the morning of January 16, when a front loader truck struck him inside his tent during an attempted clearing of the homeless encampment where he was living. Though the initial police report speculated that his death was related to a drug overdose, the Fulton County medical examiner found clear evidence of blunt-force trauma: Taylor had a lacerated spleen and liver. His pelvis had been cracked in half.
The tragedy sent shock waves through Atlanta and ignited a fierce debate over how the city handles the residents of homeless encampments, which have become a familiar presence in recent years.
Everyone agrees that Taylor should not have died. But why did a supposedly routine encampment clearance go so wrong—and how can the city prevent it from happening again?
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The tent encampment where Taylor lived and died was not shut down: After his killing, the Atlanta City Council passed a moratorium on most closure operations, and many residents returned to the Old Wheat Street site in historic Sweet Auburn. Some tents are pitched directly in the street, while others line the sidewalk or are tucked in the tangled growth of the empty lot next door. Directly across the street is the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park.
The Old Wheat Street encampment isn’t new. When Nolan English brought his homeless-services organization to Atlanta in 2011, it was the first community he visited. “When it comes to chronic homelessness, that area is kind of a perfect storm,” says English, who founded Traveling Grace Ministries after experiencing homelessness himself in his early 20s. “People are actually pretty tolerant of the homeless population there, so they’re not constantly being moved.”
At the same time, the camp’s longevity means many residents are old-timers, accustomed to living on the street and wary of hollow promises from service organizations. “A lot of people there are ready to go,” says English. “But the more you’re fumbled by the city, the more you become service resistant.”
Photograph by Johnathon Kelso
That was true for Taylor, who had been living in encampments around Atlanta for the past decade. He and Griffeth, 56, met in a tent community eight years ago, and the two quickly became inseparable. “He would make sure I had food, and if I had a bad day, he was always there,” she says.
After she had a stroke, Taylor reminded her to do her rehab exercises. Sometimes they would make up silly rap songs together. He could be prickly—his nickname was Psycho for a reason, she adds—but they loved each other.
They both struggled with their mental health—almost everyone did in the tight-knit community on Old Wheat Street. And like many people with untreated mental illness, they often self-medicated with drugs and alcohol. It was a lifestyle Griffeth wanted them to escape, but she knew it would be hard to convince Taylor to join her in permanent housing. “He’s a mover and shaker,” she says. “If he sat down, he was going to get back up again in 30 seconds.”
Nevertheless, when outreach workers from the organization SafeHouse approached them in early January about the upcoming closure of the encampment, Griffeth agreed to go to what she says she was told would be a temporary apartment. But it turned out to be a medical facility, and she returned to Old Wheat Street after a few days.
Before she left, she cautioned Taylor not to forget about the imminent closure. “‘Be careful,’ I said, ‘because they keep telling us that they’re gonna put us out.’”
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Photograph by Johnathon Kelso
Perhaps the most glaring fact to emerge in the wake of Taylor’s death was that Atlanta has no formal process for clearing homeless encampments. Partners for HOME, the nonprofit that administers homeless services on the city’s behalf, has a short brief on its website that broadly outlines a six-phase closure procedure. But without a city policy, there’s no exact record of why Old Wheat Street was slated to be “decommissioned,” the formal term for an encampment closure.
Cathryn Vassell, Partners for HOME CEO, says the organization had fielded some complaints about Old Wheat Street over the past year, but they began to escalate in fall of 2024. “We were [hearing] that the encampment had grown out of control,” she says. “It was taking over the street.”
Partners for HOME, founded in 2015 under Mayor Kasim Reed, is the lynchpin in the federally funded Continuum of Care Program, which serves Atlanta’s homeless population. But the nonprofit doesn’t provide direct services: Rather, it administers funds to smaller organizations who do on-the-ground work such as medical care and housing intake.
When the Old Wheat Street site was prioritized for closure in October, Partners for HOME instructed SafeHouse Outreach, a faith-based nonprofit, to begin connecting with residents. According to SafeHouse’s director of programs Jasmine Benton, outreach workers visited the encampment 16 times to help residents find resources and relocate.
The closure was scheduled for Thursday, January 16. That it was just before the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend was not lost on local activists. Some say they believe the city was under pressure to clear the encampment before the holiday celebration, which draws throngs of tourists and high-profile visitors. (The King Center did not reply to a request for comment on the matter.)
Additionally, Vassell says the city felt pushed to act to get ahead of a man who had begun showing up at the encampment to menace the residents. “He came out with what my team described as an entourage and a video camera,” says Vassell. “He said something like, ‘I dropped 30 M’s [million dollars] in this neighborhood. I need this encampment gone.’”
That man was later identified as Daniel Barnett, founder and CEO of an organization called Sweet Auburn Frontline Enforcement (SAFE), who also goes by Davinci Barcelo. Barnett was arrested in early March after he returned to the Old Wheat Street encampment and was filmed slashing residents’ tents.
Vassell says Barnett’s threatening behavior contributed to the decision to prioritize closing Old Wheat Street. The City of Atlanta did not respond to questions regarding the reasons for the closure. But around 9 a.m. on January 16, SafeHouse Outreach, the Atlanta Police Department, and the Department of Public Works arrived at the encampment, heavy machinery in tow.
A lack of formal encampment closure policy means another important question may never be answered: Who was responsible for the final check to make sure the tents were empty?
SafeHouse Outreach, which was there to support residents’ relocation, says it was not: “Our team is not responsible for clearing, entering, or removal of any trash or belongings,” says Benton. Neither the Atlanta Police Department nor the Department of Public Works replied to a request for comment on this question. Without a guiding policy, it’s simply possible that no agency was officially responsible, so no one performed the check.
No matter how such a tragedy occurred, many saw Taylor’s death as a sign of deep dysfunction in the city’s approach to its unsheltered community. A week after he died, Taylor’s family, flanked by community leaders and homeless advocates, called on the city to end encampment sweeps and improve its care of unhoused people. “The bulldozing of encampments did not just happen,” said Reverend Shanan Jones, president of Concerned Black Clergy. “There was a policy that came and rolled over his life.”
“Homelessness has become an industry in Atlanta. We could house the entire homeless population of Atlanta if we were just intentional about putting dollars where they need to go.” – Nolan English
The next day, City Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari introduced a resolution to put a moratorium on homeless-encampment closures. The resolution blocks most encampment sweeps—the language specifically bars heavy machinery but leaves room for closures if there are extreme safety concerns—until Partners for HOME provides a detailed report on improving such operations in the future.
In her remarks, Bakhtiari criticized the city’s Continuum of Care, the supraorganization led by Partners for HOME, saying its procedures and funding allocations need to be reexamined. “There has to be a change in how we handle homeless,” Bakhtiari said. “It has not been working.”
The city council also created a Homelessness Taskforce, comprising 33 government agencies and homelessness organizations, which will examine the city’s current policies surrounding unsheltered communities and provide recommendations.
As the city works to reform its homelessness policies, a group of nonprofits and faith-based organizations is assembling its own recommendations. The Justice for Cornelius Coalition includes Taylor’s relatives, as well as such groups as Hosea Helps and the Movement for Black Lives. A handful of Coalition members are also serving on the city’s taskforce, a crossover that could help hold the city accountable on genuine reform.
An early draft of the Coalition’s demands includes helping encampment residents obtain copies of IDs and birth certificates and creating a Homelessness Czar who would lead the city’s restructuring of its homelessness policies. The Coalition also criticized Partners for HOME, calling for the resignation of Vassell, who has been the organization’s CEO since its founding, and a funding structure that would give Partners for HOME less power to allocate homelessness spending.
Photograph by Johnathon Kelso
“Homelessness has become an industry in Atlanta,” says English of Traveling Grace Ministries, which is in both the Coalition and the city’s Homelessness Taskforce. “We could house the entire homeless population of Atlanta if we were just intentional about putting dollars where they need to go.”
English, like many homelessness advocates, thinks the city doesn’t just need to clarify how it closes encampments; it needs a genuine reckoning over why it does so in the first place. “An encampment under a bridge, closing that may be warranted because you have structures that could catch fire and fall,” he says. “But no one’s in danger over in Sweet Auburn. These are villages—this is family to these folks.”
When people are pushed out of an encampment without getting into stable housing, he notes, they tend to return, often with even less trust of outreach workers than they had before. “You’re not just perpetuating homelessness at that point,” says English. “You’re creating more service-resistant homelessness.”
Such is the case at the Old Wheat Street encampment. Most of the residents who were there when Taylor was killed are still there, some in tents bearing slash marks from the day Barnett allegedly showed up with a knife.
Lolita Griffeth, Taylor’s girlfriend, is there too, back among people she trusts after what she felt was a deceptive relocation by outreach workers. (SafeHouse says its team is always transparent about available services and does not misrepresent placement options.)
Whatever happens next, she plans to stay with others in her camp community. “We’re unified,” she says. When she feels stuck, she reminds herself of what Taylor used to say to her: “Come on, baby. You just get yourself together.”
This article appears in our May 2025 issue.
