Willie James Harris Jr., a 27-year-old Black man, was killed early on April 10, 2021, in Sandy Springs, in the Atlanta area, after gunfire erupted at the Circa 400 apartments on Northridge Road. Reports said police were in the area near Northridge and Colquitt roads around 6 a.m. when multiple shots were heard, and as officers moved in to check the complex, they found Harris in the parking lot with multiple gunshot wounds.
The scene appears to have unfolded in the dim hours just after dawn, with officers and residents suddenly pulled into the violence of a morning that had barely started. Harris was taken from the lot to the hospital, but he did not survive.
The case moved quickly in its first hours. Police said they found a suspect, Adam Farrakhan Beasley, in a nearby breezeway at the same apartment complex, where he lived, and took him into custody without incident. Public reporting at the time said Beasley, 25, was booked into the Fulton County jail and charged with murder, aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. The way the arrest was described made it seem that investigators did not have to chase the case across the city; instead, it narrowed almost immediately to the same property where Harris was found, turning the apartment complex itself into both crime scene and place of arrest.
As for later developments, the online sources I found consistently document the shooting and Beasley’s arrest and charges, but I did not find reliable public reporting in those sources detailing a later trial, conviction, or other final court outcome tied to Harris’s death. Based on the reporting that is readily available online, the clearest publicly documented development is that Harris was found shot at Circa 400, died from those wounds, and that Beasley was arrested the same day and charged in the case.
