In the early morning hours of August 13, 2021, Mariam Abdulrab, a 27-year-old female bartender, was returning to her Atlanta, Georgia, home in the Chosewood Park neighborhood after her shift at Revery VR Bar. As she arrived, a witness saw her being forced into an SUV at gunpoint. Her boyfriend also witnessed the abduction and promptly called 911, reporting that a man had held a gun to her and forced her into his vehicle.
The community was left in a state of shock and grief by the sudden and violent nature of her disappearance. Her father, Khalid Abdulrab, described his daughter as 'the most peaceful and loving person.'
A few hours after the kidnapping, at approximately 6 a.m., police received a call about shots fired in the vicinity of Lakewood Avenue and Terrace Way. Although an initial search of the area yielded nothing, a 911 call around 9:55 a.m. led officers to the discovery of a deceased person who was later identified as Mariam Abdulrab. She had been shot multiple times. The location where her body was found was roughly a mile and a half from where she had been abducted. Friends and family remembered her as a light in the community, with a genuinely sweet and contagious disposition.
The investigation quickly led police to identify DeMarcus Brinkley, then 27, as a person of interest. Later that same day, authorities in Griffin, Georgia, spotted Brinkley's SUV and attempted a traffic stop. Brinkley fled, leading police on a high-speed chase that ended when he crashed his vehicle into another car. Both Brinkley and the driver of the other vehicle were injured and transported to a hospital. Following his release from the hospital, Brinkley was taken into custody and booked into the Fulton County Jail.
Brinkley, a convicted felon with a prior conviction for child molestation for which he had been released from prison less than a year before Abdulrab's murder, was initially charged with murder, kidnapping, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. In November 2021, a grand jury indicted him on nine counts, including malice murder, felony murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted rape. In November 2023, DeMarcus Brinkley pleaded guilty to the charges against him and was sentenced to life in prison plus five years.
