Malik Leek Grover was a 14-year-old Black male whose life ended in southwest Atlanta on December 17, 2022, in a burst of gunfire that also killed his best friend, 16-year-old Justin Powell. According to local reporting and police information cited in those reports, the shooting happened at the Retreat at Greenbriar Apartments on Continental Colony Parkway after a dispute that investigators said began on social media and escalated into a face-to-face confrontation.
What started online spilled into the apartment complex parking lot, where groups of teenagers met and exchanged gunfire. When it was over, Grover and Powell were dead, and three other young people, including two teenagers and an 11-year-old child, had been wounded and taken to the hospital. Public reports identified Grover as being from Fayetteville, even though he died in Atlanta.
In the days that followed, the picture that emerged was of a boy whose death shattered the people raising and loving him. Grover’s grandmother, who was also described in reporting as his legal guardian, spoke about the shock of getting the call and the unbearable stillness left behind afterward. She said his boots were still sitting where he had left them, a small everyday detail that suddenly became a painful memorial. She remembered him as funny, athletic, full of life, and deeply loved, a kid who enjoyed football, basketball, soccer, and acting, and who should have had far more time than he got. Those family accounts turned the case from a grim police blotter item into something much more human: a child caught in the crossfire of a feud that never should have left a phone screen.
As for arrests and suspects, authorities publicly tied one arrest to the overall double killing but did not publicly solve Grover’s death in the same way. Atlanta police obtained warrants on December 23, 2022, for 19-year-old Montavious Ferguson, and by December 30 he had turned himself in. FOX 5 and 11Alive reported that Ferguson was charged with the murder of Justin Powell. But those same reports also made clear that investigators were still searching for the person they believed was responsible for killing Malik Grover. By early January 2023, Grover’s family was pleading for that second gunman to be found, and by March 2023 FOX 5 was still reporting that nobody had been arrested in Grover’s case, even though police said the investigation remained active. Based on the public reporting available, there was an arrest connected to the incident, but no publicly identified suspect or publicly reported arrest specifically for Malik Grover’s killing at that stage.
That leaves Grover’s story suspended in a painful place. The public record shows a child killed in a social-media-driven shootout, a family left begging for justice, one young man arrested in connection with Powell’s death, and a separate unanswered question hanging over Malik’s: who fired the shot that killed him. In the reporting, his grandmother’s fear was not only that time was passing, but that the person responsible was still free. Her words gave the case its most haunting edge. For Grover’s family, this was not only about what happened in a parking lot on a December night, but about the silence that followed, the missing arrest, and the sense that a boy remembered for laughter and energy was still waiting, in the eyes of those who loved him, for justice that had not yet fully arrived.
