Santos Benito López, a 36-year-old Hispanic man, was killed in a burst of gunfire outside an apartment building at 4952 Central Drive in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on the morning of June 9, 2019. DeKalb County police were called to the scene around 6:30 a.m. and found two men shot in the chest, lying face down. One of them, Santos López, was pronounced dead there. The other victim, Oscar Mateo, was taken to a hospital but also died.
A white Honda Accord sat nearby under a carport with its engine still running and the driver’s door open, while shell casings scattered across the ground suggested how sudden and violent the attack had been. Family and friends later identified the second victim alongside Mateo, and local reporting tied the killings to a shooting that shook both the neighborhood and the wider Latino community in metro Atlanta.
In the days that followed, the story of the scene became clearer than the story of the killer. Public reporting identified Mateo as a beloved cook at Noodle Decatur, and coverage of his death repeatedly named Santos López as the second man who was killed with him. Univision later reported that Mateo and López were both Guatemalan immigrants and that, according to Mateo’s brother, Mateo had moved to that apartment complex only a few weeks before the attack. The family said the men were shot outside the apartment building, and the killings left relatives with grief but very few answers. Nearly two years later, Mateo’s family was still publicly pleading for justice, saying they had heard little about progress in the case. That lingering silence around Mateo’s killing also reflected the public record surrounding López’s death: a brutal double homicide, plainly acknowledged as a homicide investigation, but with little released about who pulled the trigger or why.
As for suspects, arrests, and charges, the publicly available reporting is thin and points more to an unresolved case than to a completed prosecution. News coverage from the time of the shooting described the deaths and the crime scene, but it did not identify a suspect or announce an arrest. Univision reported in 2021 that DeKalb County police said the case was being investigated as a homicide, yet no public breakthrough was described in that report. Based on the online sources available here, there is no reliable public indication that anyone was arrested, charged, tried, or convicted in connection with the killing of Santos López.
