Armed protesters stood guard Tuesday at an Atlanta-area Wendy’s, the site where Rayshard Brooks, a black man killed twice in the back by an Atlanta police officer, died earlier this month.
Earlier in the day, a group of people had “taken control” of the burned property in South Atlanta, according to local reports.
People living in the area have also complained that the protesters who remained were no longer peaceful, but were using the space for their own benefit and sometimes blocking people on the street from passing.
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They claimed that the Atlanta police were not doing much to solve the problem, turning the lives of those living in the neighborhood into a nightmare.
“My husband literally missed being caught in the crossfire on his way home,” Kimberlee Jones told WXIA. “People have been shot and injured.”
Jones has been living a mile away from Wendy’s where Brooks was shot and said it has been physically difficult to get to his neighborhood since the group took over the parking lot and began to wreak havoc.
She added that her mother tried to get home, but people who had put up a big obstacle stopped her.
“They did not let her pass and she was intimidated,” said Jones, leader of the Atlanta Civil Association of South Atlanta neighborhood association.
During the weekend, two shootings in the area were injured.
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A protester also attacked a police officer after a man and woman claimed that a crowd of people stopped their car and attacked them while trying to pass the Wendy’s.
“It’s scary that someone will come after you like that,” one of the victims told WSB-TV. “We sided with him. We weren’t being disrespectful. We were just trying to get to the interstate. They hit me on the arms and face and legs with the rock.”
The Atlanta riots led some leaders to argue that the police had largely disappeared in action.
“A sad situation for someone today and yesterday at Wendy’s who is blocked by young men armed with pistols and long pistols,” city council president Felicia Moore tweeted over the weekend. “All the businesses surrounded are boarded. The tension is in the air and the emotions are raw. The police are not in sight. Is it Atlanta? No! We must get up!”
Calls by Fox News to the Atlanta police department for comment were not immediately returned and there has been no official statement of the arrest from the mayor’s office or the police department.
However, WSB-TV claimed that multiple police sources told them that authorities, now traveling in pairs, have been patrolling the area from “a distance.”
The civil unrest occurred when Brooks’ family and friends gathered at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church Tuesday for his funeral.
Reverend Bernice A. King, daughter of the late civil rights leader and CEO of the Center for Nonviolent Social Change Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the service.
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“We really shouldn’t be here today, this shouldn’t have happened to Rayshard,” said King.
He also spoke of Brooks’ four children and his own experience of losing a father and called for police reform so that officers cannot “continue to hide behind badges and trainings and policies and procedures rather than consider the humanity of others in general and black lives specifically. “
