Four dead in southeast Atlanta murder-suicide
By BY MIKE MORRIS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA, Ga. — Atlanta police said there were no previous “domestic-related calls” to the home where a 52-year-old man on Monday morning shot five family members, fatally wounding three, before turning the gun on himself.
“The investigation continues,” police said in an update Monday afternoon.
The murder-suicide occurred around daybreak in a small, woodframe house in the 100 block of Mt. Zion Road in southeast Atlanta.
Police identified the gunman as Abdulaziz Ibraham, 52, who was among those dead at the scene when they responded to a call.
Also dead at the scene were Hana Yusuf, 26, and Luna Tesfaye, 22, police spokesman Eric Schwartz said. Both were daughters-in-law of Ibrahim, police later said.
Mohammad Ibrahim, 29, Abdulaziz Ibraham’s son and husband of Luna Tesfaye, died a short time later at Grady Memorial Hospital, Schwartz said.
Two family members were wounded but survived. Yusef Ibrahim, 27, another son of the shooter and husband of Hana Yusuf, was in stable condition at Grady late Monday morning, police said.
Their 3-year-old son, Amir Abdulahakim, was in stable condition at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.
Police said two family members were unhurt. One was Abdulaziz Ibraham’s 26-year-old daughter, who was home but not injured; the other was his wife, who left the house with another one of Ibrahim’s sons shortly before the shooting.
“This day is so sad,” a sobbing neighbor, Charlene Weiters, said several hours after the shooting.
Weiters called Abdulaziz Ibrahim a “kind, loving person,” who “wouldn’t harm anyone.”
Weiters said the Ibrahims moved into the neighborhood about the same time she did, 12 years ago.
She said Abdulaziz Ibrahim, who “didn’t speak much English,” often worked in his yard.
“We [mow our grass] every two weeks, but we couldn’t keep up with him. . . He’d blow off the whole street. He just helped everybody,” Weiters said.
She said she believed her neighbor was retired, but she didn’t know where he had worked. “He did some kind of manufacturing work, but I’m not sure,” she said. “We didn’t get into conversations about personal business.”
Another neighbor said he believes the family was from Ethiopia.
Weiters said Abdulaziz Ibrahim had been in the hospital recently, but she assumed he was doing okay when she saw him working in his yard again.
“I think something snapped,” she said. “He just had to be sick.”
Copyright 2007 Atlanta Journal Constitution