Sunday, August 31, 2008
News, In this Issue...

City Under Siege

Atlanta’s climbing crime rate is visible and frightening

A piece of Scott King’s skull is sitting in a freezer...

By Stephanie Ramage

A piece of Scott King’s skull is sitting in a freezer at Grady Memorial Hospital.

From the window of his modest apartment on Myrtle Street in Midtown, King can almost see the intersection where a stranger smashed his head with a brick a couple of weeks ago. When he turns to point toward it, the weirdly sci-fi-ish, multiple rows of metal surgical staples in his scalp glisten.

“It’s up at Eighth and Piedmont,” he says softly, his words a little slurred. “You’ll see some loose bricks on the sidewalk. That’s where he got the brick he used.”

It happened on Friday, Aug. 15. King, 30, and his friend and neighbor, Kevin Kelly, were walking back from an evening at the High Museum, followed up with drinks and a bite to eat at Tap. It was about 1 a.m. when they started to cross Piedmont Avenue and a man began heckling King, saying he wanted his shirt.

“There was nothing special about that shirt,” Kelly remembers, “but the guy was saying that he needed it to get into a club.”

The guy was soon following close behind, demanding that King give him the shirt. King became nervous.

“He was still jabbering and without turning around I could tell that he was right behind us and that he wasn’t going to go away,” says King. “So I turned around and I decked him.”

There was a tussle. King broke free, determined to get home, which was now almost in sight. He saw a movement out of the corner of his eye, turned, and briefly saw the guy’s hand, with a brick in it, swinging into his head.

King doesn’t remember what happened after that, but Kelly does. The would-be shirt-taker, says Kelly, had vanished and King was walking around, oblivious to his injury, swinging his fists, insisting that he didn’t need to go to the hospital, as Kelly tried to get him to calm down. A group of people who had been walking up ahead called 911. The police never showed up, but an ambulance did. In the back of it, King’s body jerked through an onslaught of seizures.

“That’s when I knew that it was serious,” says Kelly. “Then, at the hospital, a nurse came out and basically told me that Scott could die.”

After King’s parents arrived, Kelly went in search of a police officer who could take a report, since the call to 911 had failed to summon one.

“Their [the APD’s] explanation to me was that there was a similar incident with a guy and a brick at about the same time, so there was some confusion,” says Kelly.

A week later, King was released, the right side of his head bulging like the small end of a football, the other side a little concave. When he walks around, he wears a helmet that the hospital gave him to protect his still-fragile cranium. Spread before him are weeks of speech therapy and convalescence. A Georgia Tech grad who designs plumbing installations, he plans to try to work from home as he waits for the swelling to go down so that his head can be reunited with the piece of his skull that sits in storage.