Beverly Jenkins, a 49-year-old Black woman, was driving home through southwest Atlanta around 12:30 a.m. on August 12, 2018, after finishing a late shift at City of Refuge, where she worked helping homeless mothers and families get back on their feet. As she traveled near the intersection of Hopkins Street and Westview Drive, a bullet struck her in the head, and her green Honda Odyssey veered off the road into an embankment.
A witness saw the van run off the roadway, and when officers arrived, they found her dead in the driver’s seat. In the first days after the killing, relatives, coworkers, and friends mourned her as a loving mother and grandmother whose work centered on caring for other people, which made the violence of her death feel especially cruel.
At first, investigators had little to say publicly about motive, and police released surveillance images of four men seen in the area after the shooting, describing them as persons of interest rather than named suspects. The case began to break open more than a month later when shell casings from the scene of Jenkins’ killing were matched to shell casings recovered during a separate carjacking on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, where another woman was shot but survived. Police said that connection helped them identify the people tied to Jenkins’ death and shifted the case from a baffling roadside killing into what prosecutors would later describe as a random attempted carjacking.
Adarius Jones was arrested on September 19, 2018, and Khalid Bays was identified as the second suspect and sought by police; authorities said both faced murder charges. Two days later, Bays turned himself in and was taken to the Fulton County Jail. Police also said they had identified all four men seen on surveillance video, but the other two were not charged in Jenkins’ homicide. Investigators described the crimes as random and alarmingly violent, and prosecutors later said Jones and Bays had tried to carjack Jenkins as she sat in her minivan after leaving work. When she tried to drive away, Bays fired a 9 mm handgun, killing her, and the two fled as her van rolled off the road.
The case ended in court in February 2020, when Jones and Bays pleaded guilty. According to court reporting, they admitted their involvement in Jenkins’ murder as well as the later carjacking and shooting connected by ballistic evidence. They pleaded guilty to charges that included murder, felony murder, criminal attempt to commit armed robbery, hijacking a motor vehicle, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, armed robbery, and aggravated battery. Jones received life in prison with the possibility of parole plus five additional years, while Bays received life with the possibility of parole plus 15 additional years. What remained after the legal case was the stark contrast that so many reports returned to: Jenkins was a woman remembered for service, peace, and love, and she was killed while simply trying to make it home from a night spent helping others.
