Jennifer Peebles

The state of Georgia has inked a record-high settlement with the heirs of a man shot to death by a state trooper following a chase in 2020. New story by my AJC colleague Shaddi Abusaid and me:

Family of man killed by Georgia state trooper gets $6.6M in record deal Andrew “A.J.” Smyrna, a 32-year-old father of two, was killed Jan. 23, 2020, when a trooper opened fire on the convertible he was driving in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood.

A story by my colleague Thad Moore and me concerning the recent shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., which killed four people and left nine others wounded.

Apparent aunt of Ga. school shooting suspect called authorities: ‘I’m just worried it was him’ A woman identifying herself as the aunt of Georgia's alleged school shooter frantically called Barrow County authorities saying she was worried her nephew was involved.

I'm late in sharing some of my latest work here, so I'll try to push my latest pieces out over the course of this week. Here's a joint effort with my friend and colleague Charles Minshew -- we dug into newly released Census data to find Atlanta had become the nation's 6th-largest metro area.

Atlanta metro area now 6th largest in U.S., Census Bureau estimates Metro Atlanta has leapfrogged both Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia to become the nation’s sixth-largest metropolitan region. While not the fastest-growing metro area in the country, the Atlanta metro had the third-largest total population increase in the country between 2022 and 2023, the Censu...