The police call was routine: a “suspicious person” was lurking at an apartment complex north of downtown. When officers responded that morning in July 2016, a “black man in a white T-shirt ” pulled a gun on them and fled, they reported. The cops shot at him, missed, and hit a purple Nissan nearby.
A few days later, abandoned clothes and papers in a vacant apartment pointed to a likely suspect: Jamarion Robinson, a 26-year-old former college football star with a recent history of psychotic episodes but no felony record. The Atlanta Police Department asked a special fugitive task force—staffed mostly by local cops but led by the U.S. Marshals—to pick him up.
The task force treated him as a major threat. Armed with submachine guns and flash-bang grenades, task force members broke down the door to a friend’s duplex he was visiting. They shot Robinson 59 times, killing him.
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