The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Jonesboro chess champ shot and killed Wednesday at the East Point MARTA station was an aspiring police officer who chased down the man who took his new touch-screen cellphone, a friend said Friday.
Anthony Beavers, 19, was a criminal law student at Westwood College and was on his way to his Jonesboro home when he was robbed, said Teresa Richardson. Beavers lived in the Richardson home, and she referred to him as her "second grandson."
"He probably didn't want to give up that possession," Richardson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday, recounting what she said police told her. "So when the young man took the phone from him, Anthony took off after him."
Broderick Smith, 20, was arrested Thursday and charged with murder. He told his mother the shooting wasn't deliberate.
"He said he was sorry," Vonda Smith told the AJC after talking to her son from the Fulton County jail. "He said he didn't mean to do it."
Broderick Smith waived his first appearance before a judge in a courtroom at the Fulton County Jail on Friday.
"He's not a violent person," said Vonda Smith, adding she didn't know of the 2009 Banneker High School grad ever owning a gun. "It was just those boys he was hanging with out in East Point. Wednesday night he was with his so-called friends."
When Smith and Beavers met Wednesday night, it changed one life and ended another.
Broderick Smith was supposed to start a new job Friday with a moving company, his mother said.
Beavers was returning home from spending time with his girlfriend after class, Richardson said.
Richardson said she didn't imagine the 6-foot-3 Beavers, who was her granddaughter's former boyfriend and now friend of the family, reacting aggressively.
"But you had to understand, he was trying to become a young man," she said.
Smith was arrested late Thursday afternoon at his mother’s apartment in the Westlake area of Fulton County.
“There is no question in my mind that he is the shooter,” MARTA Police Chief Wanda Dunham told reporters. Police have not recovered the weapon used in the shooting.
At the time of the shooting, Smith was already serving probation for crimes committed in 2006 and 2008, including two charges of theft by receiving a stolen car, criminal damage to property and obstruction.
He is now charged with murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony for Beaver’s death.
Richardson said police told her Beaver was shot because he refused to turn over his new touchscreen cellphone in a robbery attempt, but officials at the press conference said a motive for the shooting is not yet confirmed.
“I took him to get it one Sunday afternoon,” she said of the phone Beavers bought for about $150.
Beavers, a 2008 Jonesboro High School graduate, was a chess champion and “brilliant” student, a former teacher said Thursday.
Math teacher Mark McPherson, faculty sponsor of the school’s chess team, said Beavers was “liked by everyone here at the school. He really didn’t seem to make any enemies that I knew of.”
He said Beavers “had an unusual sense of humor that usually had an ability to break up an overly serious mood.”
At last year’s Clayton County chess tournament, Beavers took first place in the adult division.
“He did very well, knocking out our top contenders,” McPherson said.
“He was very brilliant when it came to academics,” McPherson said. “He seemed to get through his math classes with very little effort.”
McPherson said he felt “abject shock” Thursday morning when he learned of the shooting. “I think we’re all pretty much in shock.”
The shooting occurred at about 10:40 p.m. Wednesday near an elevator at the south end of the MARTA station.
Beavers was on the southbound side of the center train platform when two shots were fired, said a passenger who called the AJC. That side of the platform was cordoned off with crime scene tape when an AJC reporter arrived.
Riders hit the ground to avoid gunfire, witnesses said.
The first officer on the scene found Beavers lying face-down on the platform, unresponsive, according to police reports.
An ambulance was called, but eventually called-off, police said.
Immediately after the shooting, police questioned several witnesses.
Around 1 a.m., four MARTA police patrol cars sped away from the station going south on Main Street, before stopping roughly a mile away and returning minutes later.
Assistant MARTA Police Chief Joseph Dorsey said police thought they’d found a suspect.
“There was a possible (suspect) location, but it turned out to be negative,” he said.
The station is equipped with surveillance cameras, but Dorsey wouldn’t indicate how or if video footage or information from the MARTA Breeze passes were being used to help the investigation.
Police said there hadn’t been an incident this serious at a MARTA station in four years.
That was on Sept. 6, 2006, when taxi driver Bernahu Yassincq was shot and killed in his cab while parked in the taxi stand area of the Kennsington MARTA station. Police are still seeking a suspect in that shooting.
Four people waiting at a bus stop outside the College Park station suffered gunshot wounds from an apparent drive-by shooting on March 15, 2007. U.S. Marshals tracked Derrick Charles Francios to San Antonio, arresting him on felony aggravated assault charges.
Dunham insisted that Wednesday's shooting, like these other incidents, was random.
"This is an isolated incident," she said Thursday. "MARTA is safe."
Rhonda Cook, Mike Morris and Lisa Gardner contributed to this report.
