Georgia · DeKalb County · Crime & Courts

Two DeKalb County, GA Shootings Overnight: One Person Found Dead Inside a Fontaine East Condominium, One Hurt on Flat Shoals Parkway

WSB-TV reports that police responded to two shootings overnight in DeKalb County, one at the Fontaine East Condominiums, where officers found a person dead inside a condo, and one on Flat Shoals Parkway near the Family Dollar store, where the victim was taken to a hospital. Detectives are searching for suspects in both. Officers also responded to a third investigation on North Hairston Road that has not been confirmed. Nobody is named, nobody is charged, and no source cited here says the two shootings are connected. One newsroom stands behind this account.

What WSB-TV reports happened

The whole reported account is short, and this page does not make it longer than it is. WSB-TV reports that police responded to two shootings overnight in DeKalb County where one person died and another was hurt.

It then separates the two. The first shooting, in its account, happened at the Fontaine East Condominiums, where officers found a person dead inside a condo. The second happened on Flat Shoals Parkway near the Family Dollar store, and that victim was rushed to the hospital.

It closes with the status. The separate shootings happened minutes apart, WSB-TV reports, and detectives are searching for suspects in both. It adds that officers also responded to a third investigation on North Hairston Road, but have not confirmed what they responded to.

That is the entire factual record this page rests on. Everything else below is either a comparison of the headline against the body, general Georgia procedure clearly labeled as such, or an explicit statement of something that is not known. There is no second account to check any of it against, and that limitation is stated plainly rather than buried.

The Fontaine East Condominiums shooting

WSB-TV describes this as the first of the two. Officers found a person dead inside a condo at the Fontaine East Condominiums. That is the whole of it in the record compiled for this page.

What is not in that sentence is most of what a reader will want. No name. No age. No gender. No unit number, no street address, no block. No time. No description of how officers came to be there — whether a call came in, who made it, or what it reported. No weapon. No motive. No account of anyone else present. No statement about whether the person lived in the condo or was visiting it.

“Found a person dead inside a condo” is a discovery, not a reconstruction. It tells you where a body was located and that officers were the ones who located it. It does not establish where the person was shot, when, or by whom. Those are separate questions and the record compiled for this page answers none of them.

No address for the complex appears on this page. The source does not publish one, and this site does not publish street-level location detail for a private residence where a person has died in any event. Neighbors and family members read these pages.

The Flat Shoals Parkway shooting

WSB-TV describes this as the second of the two, on Flat Shoals Parkway near the Family Dollar store. The victim was rushed to the hospital.

“Rushed to the hospital” describes a transport. It is not a prognosis and not a description of injuries. The record compiled for this page gives no condition, stable or critical or otherwise, no hospital name, and no indication of whether the person was treated and released or admitted. This page does not characterize the injury beyond the word the source uses.

The Family Dollar is a landmark, not an address. WSB-TV places the shooting on Flat Shoals Parkway near the Family Dollar store. It does not say the shooting happened inside the store, in its parking lot, or that the store was involved in any way. It is a way of telling local readers roughly where on a long road this was. This page does not convert it into a location claim about a business.

Flat Shoals Parkway and Flat Shoals Road are different roads, and both exist in the DeKalb County area. The source says Parkway. This page says Parkway. Searches for the two names return each other's results constantly, which is worth knowing if you are trying to find further coverage.

“Minutes apart” is not “connected”

This is the trap in this story and it is worth being explicit about. WSB-TV's headline reads that at least one person is dead and one hurt in shootings minutes apart in DeKalb County. Its body states that the separate shootings happened minutes apart and detectives are searching for suspects in both.

The word WSB-TV uses is separate. Nothing in the record compiled for this page reports that the two shootings are linked, that one suspect is sought for both, that the same weapon was involved, that the victims knew each other, or that investigators believe there is any relationship between them. “Detectives are searching for suspects in both” is a plural, and a plural is not a shared suspect.

Proximity in time is not evidence of connection. In a county of DeKalb's size, two shootings in one overnight period is not by itself remarkable, and the fact that a headline places them in the same sentence is an editorial decision about packaging, not a finding by anyone. Readers reliably supply the missing link themselves, and once that inference is made it is very hard to unmake.

Nor does the record compiled for this page give any clock time for either shooting. “Minutes apart” is the source's own characterization of the interval, and this page reports it as that characterization. No times are published here, because none were published in the account this page rests on.

The North Hairston Road response is unconfirmed

WSB-TV reports that officers also responded to a third investigation on North Hairston Road, but have not confirmed what they responded to. Read that sentence carefully, because it is doing something unusual: it is reporting the existence of a police response while explicitly declining to characterize it.

It is not called a shooting anywhere in the record compiled for this page. It is called a third investigation. That could describe a great many things. This page does not count it as a third shooting, does not add it to a casualty total, and does not describe it as related to either of the two shootings above.

This is the kind of item that becomes a fact through repetition. One outlet notes an unconfirmed third response; a second aggregator writes “three shootings”; by the fourth retelling the county has had a violent night involving three separate gun crimes, none of which anyone ever confirmed. The correct handling is to publish it as what it is — a response that has not been characterized — and to say so every time it is mentioned.

What would resolve it is a statement from the responding agency or an incident report. Neither appears in the record compiled for this page.

An older North Hairston Road story that is not this one

Attention: searching North Hairston Road together with DeKalb County returns a FOX 5 Atlanta story headlined that a man was shot to death on North Hairston Road, DeKalb police say. That story is dated April 18, 2025. It describes police responding to a person shot call in the 1100 block of North Hairston Road near Central Drive in the Stone Mountain area around 6 p.m., a man found near a business who died of his injuries, and that police told FOX 5 Atlanta the shooting may be connected to an attempted carjacking.

That is a different incident, in a different year, with a different fact pattern. It is named here for one reason only: so a reader who finds it while searching for the unconfirmed response described above does not mistake one for the other. Nothing in it is evidence about anything on this page, and this page draws no connection whatsoever between them.

This is a recurring hazard with road-name searches. A busy road accumulates incidents over years, and search engines are indifferent to dates. Before treating any result as coverage of the events described here, check its publication date against Aug. 13, 2026.

Nobody is named and nobody is charged

No name appears on this page because no name appears in the record compiled for it. Neither victim is identified. No age is given for either. No gender is given for either. This page does not supply any of those, and does not describe either victim in a way that would narrow who they might be.

Nobody is charged either, and that distinction matters more than it looks. This site normally spends its space explaining that a charged person is not a convicted person. Here the situation is a step further back: there is no charged person at all. WSB-TV reports that detectives are searching for suspects. That means an investigation is looking for someone. It does not mean someone has been identified, located, named, arrested or accused.

No suspect description of any kind appears in the record compiled for this page — no age range, no clothing, no vehicle, no direction of travel, no number of people sought. This page publishes none, and a reader should not fill that space with an assumption.

Identification of a person who has died is not a news function. It runs through the medical examiner's office and the investigating agency, and it waits on notification of next of kin. A family learning of a death from a website is the outcome that rule exists to prevent, and it is why this page would not publish a name here even if one were circulating informally.

Where our sources differ

This page has one source, so this table does something slightly different from usual: it sets that source's headline against its own body, and it marks every field the account leaves empty. A blank is a real finding here. It is the most common way a reader ends up believing something nobody reported.

The one genuine internal mismatch is the first row. “At least 1 dead” leaves room for a higher number; “one person died” does not. This page reports one death, because that is what the body states, and it flags the headline's hedge here rather than pretending the two are identical.

This is a single-source story

One newsroom stands behind this account: WSB-TV, a Cox Media Group station. A search was run for a second, independently owned newsroom carrying these two shootings — Atlanta News First, which is Gray Media; FOX 5 Atlanta, which is FOX Television Stations; and 11Alive, which is TEGNA, among the outlets looked for. No second owner was located for the record compiled for this page.

That statement is scoped deliberately. It says what this desk found, not what any newsroom did or did not publish. Another outlet may well have covered this somewhere this search did not reach, and coverage of an overnight incident often lands hours later.

Syndication is not corroboration. A copy of this WSB-TV story circulates on at least one large aggregation platform. That is the same Cox Media Group copy at a second web address, and counting it as a second source would be inventing corroboration — the one error this site treats as unrecoverable.

What single-sourcing changes for a reader: every fact on this page traces to one newsroom's account of one night. There is no second desk that checked which shooting was first, whether the North Hairston Road response was a shooting at all, or whether “at least 1 dead” or “one person died” is the more accurate figure. Those are precisely the questions a second independent account normally settles, and here there is not one.

Which story this page is, exactly

This matters because near-identical stories exist. The account this page relies on is the WSB-TV story headlined that at least one person is dead and one hurt in shootings minutes apart in DeKalb County, bylined WSBTV.com News Staff and timestamped Aug. 13, 2026 at 4:21 a.m. EDT. Its dateline reads DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. Its two locations are the Fontaine East Condominiums and Flat Shoals Parkway near the Family Dollar store.

If a story you are reading names different streets, it is a different story. DeKalb County generates a steady volume of overnight incident coverage, headlines are reused almost verbatim across months, and a page that looks like this one may describe an entirely different night at an entirely different address. The three markers to check are the date, the two location names, and the reference to the unconfirmed North Hairston Road response.

This page also does not treat any previously published DeKalb County shooting as background evidence for this one. Other DeKalb incidents this site has covered involve different roads, different victims and different investigations, and none of them establishes anything about these two shootings. They are not cited here and they are not related here.

Which agency is which in DeKalb County

The account compiled for this page does not name a department, so this section is general background about how DeKalb County is policed, and nothing in it is a statement about who is handling these two shootings.

The DeKalb County Police Department is the county police agency with jurisdiction in unincorporated DeKalb County. Much of the county is unincorporated, which is why it is the agency most often named in county-wide incident coverage.

Several cities inside DeKalb County run their own police departments, and a location that sounds like it is in DeKalb County may sit inside a municipality with its own agency. That is why naming a department from a dateline alone is unsafe, and why this page does not do it.

The DeKalb County Sheriff's Office is a separate office from the county police department. It operates the county jail and serves court process. It is not the agency that ordinarily investigates a county homicide, and sheriff and police are not interchangeable words in Georgia.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation does not automatically take over a local homicide. It enters a local case when a local agency, a prosecutor or another authorized official requests it, or where a statute directs it. No GBI involvement appears in the record compiled for this page. The Georgia State Patrol is a separate agency again, with a highway and traffic mission, and it does not appear here either.

Who investigates a homicide in unincorporated DeKalb County

Two inquiries run in parallel, and families routinely need both.

The criminal investigation belongs to the police agency with jurisdiction. Homicide detectives take the scene, canvass for witnesses, collect and submit evidence, seek video, and build a case file. That file is what eventually goes to a prosecutor. In Georgia, a felony prosecution runs through the district attorney for the judicial circuit, and unless indictment is waived a felony must be presented to a grand jury, which returns either a true bill of indictment or a no bill. A grand jury decides only whether a case proceeds, not whether anyone is guilty.

The death investigation belongs to the county's coroner or medical examiner function. Georgia's death investigation statutes set this in motion independently of the criminal case. O.C.G.A. section 45-16-24 requires immediate notification of the coroner or county medical examiner when a person dies as a result of violence, by suicide or casualty, suddenly when in apparent good health, in any suspicious or unusual manner, and in a series of further listed circumstances.

O.C.G.A. section 45-16-25 then sets the first steps. The coroner or county medical examiner shall immediately take charge of the body. A coroner must summon a medical examiner and a proper peace officer; a county medical examiner must summon a proper peace officer. Together they make inquiries regarding the cause, manner, and circumstances of death. Cause and manner are distinct determinations, and manner is the one that carries the word homicide.

Nothing in this section describes anything that was done in these two cases. The record compiled for this page does not say who responded, who is investigating, whether a medical examiner was called, or what any determination was. It is here so a reader knows which office to call.

What the medical examiner's office does

DeKalb County operates a Medical Examiner's Office, which describes itself as providing comprehensive forensic death investigation and postmortem examination concerning all manners of death. Its office is at 3550 Kensington Road in Decatur, and its published telephone number is 404-508-3500.

It is the office that handles identification. Where a person has died and is not immediately identified, or where next of kin have not been reached, this is the office doing that work — not the news, and not a social media account. It is also the office that produces the autopsy and death investigation records, which are separate documents from the police incident report and are requested separately.

Its work is independent of whether anyone is ever arrested. Cause and manner of death are medical and investigative determinations. They do not wait on a suspect, a charge or a trial, and a family can pursue them regardless of where the criminal case stands.

Nothing in the record compiled for this page describes any medical examiner action in connection with the death at the Fontaine East Condominiums. No cause of death, no manner of death and no identification appears in anything cited here.

What “detectives are searching for suspects” means

It means an investigation is open and no one is in custody. That is the whole of it.

It does not mean a suspect has been identified. Searching for suspects is compatible with having a name and being unable to find the person, and equally compatible with having no idea who is responsible. The record compiled for this page does not distinguish between those two situations, and this page does not guess which one applies.

It does not mean there is more than one person involved. The plural in a sentence covering two separate shootings does not establish the number of people sought in either.

It is not a lookout and it is not a public safety instruction. No agency in the record compiled for this page has asked the public to watch for anyone, described anyone, or said anything about ongoing danger to the area. This page passes along no such statement, because none exists in what it cites.

How to get an incident report in DeKalb County

Incident reports are public records held by the agency that made the report, not by a news outlet. Where the incident occurred in unincorporated DeKalb County, that ordinarily means the DeKalb County Police Department through its central records function. Where it occurred inside a city with its own police department, it means that city's agency. Jail and booking records sit with the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office. Once a prosecution is filed, the accusation or indictment and the docket sit with the clerk of court.

Requests are made under the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. section 50-18-70 and the sections following it. Under O.C.G.A. section 50-18-71, an agency must produce records responsive to a request within a reasonable amount of time not to exceed three business days. Where responsive records exist but are not available within that period, the agency must provide a description of such records and a timeline for when they will be available. Under subsection (d), an agency withholding all or part of a record must notify the requester of the specific legal authority for the exemption by Code section, subsection, and paragraph.

Cost is capped by statute. Copying is limited to ten cents per page for letter or legal size documents, and no charge may be made for the first quarter hour of search and retrieval time. An agency quoting a large fee for a single incident report is worth questioning against those figures.

Ask for the right document. O.C.G.A. section 50-18-72(a)(4) exempts records of law enforcement, prosecution or regulatory agencies in a pending investigation or prosecution, and provides that an investigation or prosecution is no longer deemed pending when all direct litigation involving it has become final or otherwise terminated. But that paragraph expressly does not apply to initial police arrest reports and initial incident reports, which remain subject to disclosure. So request the initial incident report by date and location. Requesting the investigative file in an open homicide invites a lawful refusal, and the refusal will be correct.

Put the request in writing and keep a copy. A dated written request starts the statutory clock and gives you something to point to. Name the date, the approximate location, and the document type, and ask for the case or report number in the response so any follow-up request is easier.

What a family does when a relative may be a victim

Start with the agency, not with the news. Call the police agency with jurisdiction over the location on its non-emergency line and ask to be connected to the detective assigned. Give your relationship to the person and the identifying details you have. A news story does not have access to a hospital census or an unidentified decedent, and reporters cannot confirm an identity for you.

If a death may be involved, call the medical examiner's office. In DeKalb County that office is at 3550 Kensington Road in Decatur, reachable at 404-508-3500. Ask what identifying information they need, what the identification process involves, and when information can be released. That office handles identification and next-of-kin notification.

If a person was transported, hospitals will not confirm a patient to a caller in many circumstances. The investigating agency is generally the better route to learning where someone was taken and whether they can receive visitors.

Write down names and times. Every officer, investigator and office you speak to, with the date and what you were told. Cases pass between shifts and units, and a contemporaneous record of who told you what is the single most useful thing a family can keep.

Ask the prosecuting office about its victim-witness unit. Georgia funds victim assistance through prosecutors' offices, and that unit handles notifications about court dates, explains what is happening procedurally, and helps with compensation paperwork. You do not have to wait for an arrest to make contact.

Do not post identifying details before notification. Naming a person on social media before family has been reached is how relatives learn of a death from a stranger. It also risks naming the wrong person entirely in the first confused hours, which is a harm that cannot be taken back.

What Georgia's murder statute says

This is general Georgia law. Nobody is charged in the record compiled for this page, no charging decision has been described, and nothing in this section is a statement that any offense has been established in either incident.

O.C.G.A. section 16-5-1 defines the offense. Subsection (a) provides that a person commits the offense of murder when he unlawfully and with malice aforethought, either express or implied, causes the death of another human being. Subsection (b) explains that express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take the life of another human being which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof, and that malice shall be implied where no considerable provocation appears and where all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.

The statute also reaches felony murder. Subsection (c) provides that a person commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice. That is the provision under which a death occurring during another felony can be charged as murder without proof of an intent to kill.

Punishment is set by subsection (e): a person convicted of the offense of murder shall be punished by death, by imprisonment for life without parole, or by imprisonment for life.

A death is not automatically a murder. Manner of death is a medical examiner determination; whether an offense occurred and which one is a prosecutorial and ultimately a judicial question. Georgia law recognizes lesser homicide offenses and recognizes justification. None of that has been reached in anything cited here, and this page applies no label to either incident beyond the word the source uses: shooting.

What victim resources exist in Georgia

One person was killed and one was hurt in the account this page rests on, so this section is not hypothetical. It is still general information, because no victim is identified and nothing here is tailored to anyone.

Georgia operates a crime victims compensation program administered by the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. It can help with expenses such as medical treatment, counseling, lost wages and funeral costs where a person is injured or killed by a qualifying crime and the loss is not covered by another source. It is a payer of last resort, not a first stop, and it does not duplicate insurance.

O.C.G.A. section 17-15-7 sets out who may receive an award, including a person physically injured or killed as a direct result of a crime, dependents of such a victim, people who suffer serious mental or emotional trauma in the circumstances the statute describes, people injured while trying to prevent a crime or aid a victim, and third parties who assume a victim's expenses. Property loss is excluded, and a person criminally responsible for the crime cannot receive compensation.

The reporting rule causes most avoidable denials. O.C.G.A. section 17-15-8(a) requires the board to find that police records show the crime was promptly reported to the proper authorities, and provides that in no case may an award be made where the report was made more than 72 hours after the occurrence, unless the board finds good cause for the delay. That good-cause exception is real. A late report is not automatically fatal to a claim.

Cooperation is discretionary, not a trap door. O.C.G.A. section 17-15-8(a.1) provides that the board, upon finding that a claimant or award recipient has not fully cooperated with all law enforcement agencies, may deny, reduce, or withdraw an award. May is the operative word.

An arrest is not a precondition. A claim does not depend on anyone being caught, charged or convicted, which matters a great deal in a case where detectives are still searching. Nothing on this page is legal advice and this site is not a law firm.

The Crime Victims' Bill of Rights

Georgia recognizes a set of victim rights beginning at O.C.G.A. section 17-17-1, which declares it the policy of this state that victims of crimes should be accorded certain basic rights just as the accused are accorded certain basic rights.

Those rights run through the case, and include notice of court proceedings and scheduling changes; notice of an arrest, a release or an escape; the right to be present at proceedings, subject to limited exceptions; the right to be heard regarding release, plea and sentencing; the right to object in parole proceedings; the right to confer with the prosecuting attorney; the right to restitution; the right to proceedings free from unreasonable delay; and the right to be treated fairly and with dignity by criminal justice agencies.

Rights that depend on notice depend on the office having your contact information. The practical step is to make sure the investigating agency and, once a case is filed, the prosecuting office have a current address, phone number and email for the family, and to ask specifically to be placed on notification.

None of these rights requires a conviction to attach, and several of them operate long before one. In a case with no arrest, the ones that matter first are notice of an arrest when it happens and the ability to confer with the prosecuting office.

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What we don't know yet

Nothing above is filled in by inference. Where a fact is missing, this page says so and scopes that statement to the record compiled for it. This page does not revisit itself as the story develops.

What this page will not do

It will not say the two shootings are connected. No sentence here links them, and the only relationship reported is that they happened minutes apart in the same county on the same night.

It will not count three shootings. The North Hairston Road response is unconfirmed in the account this page rests on and is described that way everywhere it appears here.

It will not name anyone. Not a victim, not a suspect, not a person of interest. Nobody is named in the record compiled for this page and nobody is named here.

It will not supply an age, a gender, a time or an address that the source did not publish. A missing field is reported as missing.

It will not treat a syndicated copy as a second source, and it will not claim more sourcing than it has. This is one newsroom's account and the page says so in four places.

It will not update itself. This page is a record of what one named outlet reported and what the verified statutes say, as of publication. Nothing revisits it.

Frequently asked questions

What happened in DeKalb County overnight?
WSB-TV reports that police responded to two shootings overnight in DeKalb County where one person died and another was hurt. It reports that the first shooting happened at the Fontaine East Condominiums, where officers found a person dead inside a condo, and that the second shooting happened on Flat Shoals Parkway near the Family Dollar store, where the victim was rushed to the hospital. That is the entirety of what the account compiled for this page describes. One newsroom stands behind it.

Were the two shootings connected?
Nothing in the record compiled for this page says they were. WSB-TV reports that the separate shootings happened minutes apart and that detectives are searching for suspects in both. The word it uses is separate. It does not report that the two are linked, does not describe a common suspect, and does not describe a motive for either. Two shootings occurring close together in time in the same county is a fact about timing, not a finding about causation, and this page does not convert one into the other.

What time did each shooting happen?
No clock time for either shooting appears in the record compiled for this page. WSB-TV describes them as overnight and as minutes apart, and its story is timestamped Aug. 13, 2026 at 4:21 a.m. EDT. That timestamp is when the story was published, not when either shooting occurred. This page publishes no time for either incident, because supplying one would mean inventing it.

Who was killed?
No name is published in the record compiled for this page, and no name appears here. WSB-TV describes a person found dead inside a condo at the Fontaine East Condominiums. It does not give a name, an age, or a gender. It does not say the person lived there. Identification of a decedent and notification of next of kin are functions of the medical examiner and the investigating agency, and no such release appears in anything cited here.

How badly was the second person hurt?
WSB-TV reports that the victim of the Flat Shoals Parkway shooting was rushed to the hospital. No condition, no description of injuries, no hospital name, and no name, age or gender for that person appears in the record compiled for this page. Rushed to the hospital describes a transport, not a prognosis, and this page does not upgrade or downgrade it into one.

Was there a third shooting on North Hairston Road?
That is exactly what has not been established. WSB-TV reports that officers also responded to a third investigation on North Hairston Road, but have not confirmed what they responded to. A response is not an incident type. Nothing in the record compiled for this page calls the North Hairston Road response a shooting, and this page does not count it as one, does not add it to the total, and does not fold it into the two shootings above.

Is the North Hairston Road response the same as the fatal North Hairston Road shooting I found online?
No. A search for North Hairston Road and DeKalb County surfaces a FOX 5 Atlanta story headlined that a man was shot to death on North Hairston Road, DeKalb police say. That story is published April 18, 2025, and describes a person shot call in the 1100 block of North Hairston Road near Central Drive in the Stone Mountain area around 6 p.m., a man found near a business who died of his injuries, and a possible connection to an attempted carjacking. That is a different incident from a different year. It is named here only so a reader does not mistake it for the unconfirmed response described above.

Has anyone been arrested or charged?
No. WSB-TV reports that detectives are searching for suspects in both shootings. That is a description of an ongoing search, not of a person in custody. No arrest, no charge, no warrant, no suspect description and no person of interest appears in the record compiled for this page. Because nobody is charged, this page names nobody in connection with either shooting, and no reader should infer that a suspect has been identified.

Which agency is investigating?
WSB-TV's account refers to police, officers and detectives, and its dateline reads DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. The story compiled for this page does not name the department. This page therefore does not assert an agency. As general background: the DeKalb County Police Department is the county police agency with jurisdiction in unincorporated DeKalb County, several cities inside the county run their own police departments, the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office runs the jail and serves court process, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation enters a local case by request rather than automatically. None of that is a statement about who is working these two shootings.

Who investigates a homicide in unincorporated DeKalb County?
As a general matter, two offices work in parallel. The police agency with jurisdiction investigates the crime, through detectives who handle the scene, witnesses and evidence. Separately, the death itself is investigated under Georgia's death investigation statutes by the county's medical examiner function. In DeKalb County that is the DeKalb County Medical Examiner's Office, which describes itself as providing comprehensive forensic death investigation and postmortem examination. Those are two different inquiries producing two different records, and a family often needs both.

What does Georgia law require when someone dies violently?
O.C.G.A. section 45-16-24 requires immediate notification of the coroner or county medical examiner when a person dies as a result of violence, by suicide or casualty, suddenly when in apparent good health, in any suspicious or unusual manner, and in a list of further circumstances. O.C.G.A. section 45-16-25 then provides that the coroner or county medical examiner shall immediately take charge of the body, and that the official shall summon a proper peace officer, with the two together making inquiries regarding the cause, manner, and circumstances of death. That is the general statutory framework, not a description of anything done in these cases.

How do I get a copy of the incident report?
Incident reports are public records held by the agency that made the report, not by a news outlet. Requests are made under the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. section 50-18-70 and the sections following it. Under O.C.G.A. section 50-18-71, an agency must produce responsive records within a reasonable amount of time not to exceed three business days, and where responsive records exist but are not available within that period the agency must provide a description of such records and a timeline for when they will be available. Under subsection (d), an agency withholding all or part of a record must notify the requester of the specific legal authority for the exemption by Code section, subsection, and paragraph. Copying is capped at ten cents per page for letter or legal size documents, and no charge may be made for the first quarter hour of search and retrieval time.

The agency told me the file is closed while the case is open. Is that allowed?
Partly, and the exception is the part worth knowing. O.C.G.A. section 50-18-72(a)(4) exempts records of law enforcement, prosecution or regulatory agencies in a pending investigation or prosecution, and provides that an investigation or prosecution is no longer deemed pending when all direct litigation involving it has become final or otherwise terminated. But that same paragraph states that it does not apply to initial police arrest reports and initial incident reports, which remain subject to disclosure. So ask for the initial incident report by date and location. Asking for the investigative file in an open homicide invites a lawful refusal.

What should a family do if they think a relative may be one of these victims?
Contact the police agency with jurisdiction directly and ask to speak with the detective assigned, rather than relying on a news story, a social media post or a neighbor. If a death is involved, the county medical examiner's office is the office that handles identification and next-of-kin notification, and in DeKalb County that office is at 3550 Kensington Road in Decatur and can be reached at 404-508-3500. Ask what identifying information they need and what will be released and when. Do not go to the scene, and do not post identifying details before notification, because a family member can learn of a death from a stranger's post.

What help exists for victims and families in Georgia?
Georgia operates a crime victims compensation program administered by the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, which can help with medical treatment, counseling, lost wages and funeral costs where the loss is not covered by another source. It is a payer of last resort. O.C.G.A. section 17-15-8(a) requires that police records show the crime was promptly reported, and provides that in no case may an award be made where the report was made more than 72 hours after the occurrence unless the board finds good cause for the delay. O.C.G.A. section 17-15-8(a.1) provides that the board may deny, reduce or withdraw an award on finding a claimant has not fully cooperated with law enforcement, which is discretionary rather than automatic. An arrest, a charge and a conviction are not eligibility requirements.