A 62-year-old Black man died after getting into an argument with an Atlanta police officer over a minor traffic accident this month, and now his family wants answers.
Late on the evening of Aug. 10, Officer Kiran Kimbrough responded to the scene of the accident at the intersection of Cunningham Place and Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard late that night. Kimbrough found Johnny Hollman at fault for the incident and started to issue a traffic ticket.
The situation escalated when Hollman, according to police, became “agitated and uncooperative.” Kimbrough struggled with Hollman for several minutes before finally using a Taser on him and handcuffing him with the aid of some of the witnesses.
At that point, Hollman became unresponsive, and an ambulance was called to the scene. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
“I heard my daddy asking them, begging them,” said Hollman’s daughter Arnitra Hollman in an interview with local station WSB TV. “He said, ‘This black car just hit me.’ I never hung up.”
Arnitra Hollman was on the phone with her father shortly after the traffic accident to listen in on the police during the exchange.
“Seventeen minutes, I was on the phone with him for 17 minutes from my house to where he was,” Hollman said. “The officer was like, ‘What I say? What I say?’ He was really aggressive.”
Hollman believes that if the officer had just listened to her father, he might still be alive today.
It is still not confirmed what exactly caused Hollman’s death. The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office is conducting an autopsy.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the family’s attorney, Mawuli Davis, says his firm has seen video of the encounter recorded by witnesses, although he did not describe what those recordings depicted. Davis is calling for APD to release bodycam footage from the scene.
Davis, who spoke to reporters at a news conference on Friday, Aug. 18, also decried what he called the character assassination of Hollman after police said the church deacon’s impounded truck contained a gun, nine bags of marijuana, and a scale, among other items.
The attorney, who said the truck was shared by family members and none of the contraband belonged to Hollman, said, “Our hope is that he can, like other folks, be a victim and not have to be character assassinated. We need to reach a point in America where Black people can just be victims.”
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is investigating the incident.
