Anthony Hopgood, a 30-year-old Black man, was killed on January 24, 2022, in East Point, just outside Atlanta, after gunfire erupted near the Piggly Wiggly and Citgo along the 3000 block of Washington Road. Police were called to the scene just before 5 p.m. and found him lying in the road with multiple gunshot wounds. Paramedics examined him there, but he was pronounced dead, leaving investigators to piece together a daylight killing in one of the city’s busiest commercial stretches.
Early reports said the shooter had fled before officers arrived, and the case began with police trying to identify who had pulled the trigger and why the confrontation turned fatal.
As the investigation moved forward, East Point police said they developed suspects soon after the shooting. On February 23, 2022, authorities announced two arrests. Police identified Chad Okelley, 28, as the man accused of shooting and killing Hopgood, and said he was charged with murder. A second man, 31-year-old Keenan Higgins, was also taken into custody and was accused not of the killing itself, but of gun possession offenses connected to the incident, specifically possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. The public account that emerged was of a case that quickly shifted from an open manhunt to a targeted arrest operation, with investigators saying they had identified the men involved after the suspects left the scene.
Publicly available news coverage located online consistently reports those arrests and charges, but I did not find reliable later reporting from those sources confirming a trial result or conviction in Hopgood’s case. Based on the available coverage, the clearest publicly reported outcome is that Okelley was arrested on a murder charge in connection with Hopgood’s death, while Higgins was arrested on a related firearm charge. That leaves the story, in the public record at least, ending not in a courtroom verdict but at the point where police said they had identified the men they believed were responsible and taken them into custody.
