Tag: crime

Paul Cervino is a Marine who has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, most recently in 2011. Stateside after that, he found himself in Arizona, in training to open a Bio-One franchise in Atlanta.

Nicole Guerrero and her husband moved to East Atlanta in 2012. It wasn't long before they were initiated into a club where no one wants to be a member.

The Atlanta field office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives seized more than 900 firearms last fiscal year. Some end up in museums, while others are repurposed for use by law enforcement. But most of them are destroyed.

A family dispute is flaring in a cramped kitchen in southeast Atlanta when Ashley Gibson arrives. Gibson is five foot three, with pearl earrings and pink-painted fingernails, her hair swept into a high bun that recalls her cheerleading years. Despite her slight stature, Gibson doesn’t flinch.

A gunshot rang out the morning of December 31 last year, and it’s been echoing in Eugene Thomas’s mind ever since. Thomas and his fiancee live on a cul-de-sac in a sleepy neighborhood. Police and firefighters have honored the couple for their volunteer work with neighborhood youth.

I’m driving home, just 150 yards from my house, when I see a white Chevy Tahoe in my driveway. According to social media and local news blogs, it’s the car a crew of burglars has been using for about a week to break into homes all around us—Oakhurst, Kirkwood, East Lake.

In August 1844, a New Englander by the name of Jonathan Norcross opened a sawmill at the corner of Decatur and Pratt streets; powered by a blind and ancient horse, it was the first manufacturing operation in Marthasville, the little town sprouting around the terminus of the Western and Atlantic railway.

I don’t have much patience for nostalgia. Too often it feels like willful distortion. But as we worked on this month’s crime package, I kept thinking back to the town where I grew up.