ATLANTA -- The phone kept ringing in Jesse Price’s home early on April 4. His wife answered, then screamed.
“Camryn has been shot in the head,” she told her husband.
Camryn, 21, who had been leaving the Magic City nightclub on Forsyth Street when shots rang out, died at Grady Memorial Hospital. The car she’d been riding in was riddled with bullet holes, its back window shattered.
No arrests have been made.
“I really want them to catch the person or people, whoever was involved, just to know why. Was it for her? There is no way my daughter had a problem with anybody that cause that person or people to want to shoot and kill my daughter,” Jesse Price said. “I just want to know why.”
Camryn Price was a hardworking hairstylist, beloved by her customers, who was visiting friends in Atlanta. Her parents clung to hope as they drove the four hours from Lancaster, South Carolina.
“I’ll be in the lobby when you guys get here,” a detective told them as they began the drive.
“This isn’t good,” Jesse Price thought.
The middle of five children, Camryn planned to open a salon and asked her dad for advice and help just days before she died.
“Whenever you are ready let me know,” her father told her. “I love you.”
“I love you too, Daddy,” she replied.
It was the last time they talked.
Taqueria Barber was planning to celebrate the Fourth of July with family and friends until she got a call from her sister. Their brother, Chasin Homer, had been shot to death.
“I just start screaming, ‘No, no it’s not him. How do you know it’s him?” Barber insisted. “They got the wrong person. It’s not him’.”
Barber ended the call, sat down and dialed her sister back.
“She confirmed they had identified Chasin and it was his body,” she said. “He had been shot.”
Police had been called to the Grove Adams Park complex at 1991 Delowe Drive and found Homer, 24, dead from a gunshot wound.
“It’s a bad dream that you wish you could just stop and wake up from,” Barber said. Her brother was a family man, who liked to care for and help others, including her two children, she said.
The second-oldest of five siblings, Homer was born in Atlanta and raised near Fairburn. He graduated from Atlanta Technical College last year and had recently moved to Grove Adams Park.
“It was supposed to be temporary” Barber said.
The complex, formerly known as Vesta Adams Park, is one of the persistently dangerous apartment complexes identified in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Dangerous Dwellings investigation. It has been identified by both Atlanta and Fulton County as a “problem property” due to chronic code violations and crime.
Barber wants justice and answers and for young people to be involved in churches, mentorships or programs to keep them off the street.
“I would never want anyone to experience this trauma, what we went through,” she said. “Even though this is a horrible situation, I pray that some good comes out of this.”
Ashely Burton was a star on the rise, her mother, Emma Jean Burton, said. At 37, the hairstylist was building an empire in Atlanta and pouring her heart into the business.
“People told me that Ashley curled hair like no other,” her mother said after she was shot to death April 11 at the City Park Atlanta apartment complex. “They said they couldn’t get anybody to get their hair to stay the way Ashley did it.”
She started doing hair in a room at her mother’s home in 2011. She made a name for herself first in South Carolina and later in Augusta before trying to put down roots in Atlanta.
“People want to be just like her,” Burton said.
Ashley’s brother, Patrick Burton, said his sister was very driven, ambitious and business-minded.
“A lot of people had to go to school for sew-ins,” he said, “but with Ashley it was a talent, it was a gift.”
Darius Mills, 31, faces multiple charges, including murder and armed robbery. Investigators said the incident began with a dispute in Burton’s apartment.
Burton was one of three Black transgender women to be shot in Atlanta this year, two fatally.
Jatonne Sterling was the kind of player any coach would want to have, his baseball coach recalled.
“He was excellent. Everybody loved him. He was a coach’s dream, a coach would want to have 25 Jatonne Sterlings,” Ernest Radcliffe said.
Sterling wasn’t yet a teenager when he ran up to Radcliffe and greeted the coach with “the firmest handshake you can ever imagine.”
At 20, the Chicago native was attending Clark Atlanta University when he was shot to death near campus the afternoon of Feb. 28. Keontay Holliman-Peoples, 25, was arrested and charged with felony murder, aggravated assault and other charges.
Holliman-Peoples is not a student at the university, police said, but the two men knew each other.
Clark Atlanta University stopped classes for a week and postponed mid-semester exams a week after the shooting. In a message to students, university president George T. French Jr. described Sterling’s death as a “tragic loss.”
Sterling played for several baseball and football teams coached by Radcliffe, including travel teams. Radcliffe said Sterling chose to play at Clark Atlanta after a campus visit and being recruited. He keeps in touch with former players and last spoke with Sterling a week and a half before the shooting.
Sterling was a good student and a “sensational young man” who’d always respond with a “Yes, sir” or “No, sir,” Radcliffe said. He also stepped up to help his family after his father died unexpectedly a few years ago.
“He was everything to his mom,” Radcliffe said. “He became the man of the house.”
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