On a cold February evening in 1980, Alfred Morris Johnson Jr., a 31-year-old Black / African American male, was working an off-duty security shift at the Big Buy Food Store on Flat Shoals Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. An officer with the Atlanta Police Department for six years and a U.S. Marine veteran, Johnson was a husband and a father to two young daughters, aged five and two.
His life was cut short on February 16, 1980, when two masked men entered the grocery store in an act of armed robbery.
One of the assailants was armed with a sawed-off shotgun, and the other carried a handgun. Officer Johnson, in a courageous attempt to protect the store's patrons, confronted the man with the shotgun and wrestled with him for control of the weapon. During the struggle, he was shot in the abdomen. As he lay wounded on the floor, the second gunman also fired at him. The robbers then proceeded to steal money and food stamps from the store before fleeing the scene. Johnson was rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital, but he succumbed to his injuries.
In the years that followed, the murder of Officer Alfred Morris Johnson Jr. remained the only unsolved killing of an Atlanta police officer. The case grew cold, though investigators had early leads. Within a couple of years of the murder, detectives had identified two gunmen and a female getaway driver as suspects. A convicted bank robber, who was cellmates with one of the alleged gunmen, provided information to the police. This information even led to the recovery of the pistol used in the robbery, which was matched to a slug from Johnson's body. However, a deal to secure the informant's cooperation in exchange for a reduced sentence was not pursued by the district attorney at the time, and the suspects were never charged.
Decades later, the case was reopened. In 2010, the Atlanta Police Department announced a $35,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Johnson's murder. The following year, his case was featured on the television show "America's Most Wanted" in an effort to generate new leads. Despite these efforts and the passage of time, no arrests have ever been made in the case. The murder of Officer Alfred Morris Johnson Jr. continues to be a painful and unresolved chapter for his family and the Atlanta Police Department.
