A mass shooting on Edgewood Avenue early Monday morning left Atlanta reeling and increased calls for more violence intervention work from grassroots organizations working in schools and neighborhoods across the city.

At 1:27 a.m. Monday, Atlanta police received reports that multiple people were shot near the Edgewood at Hilliard streetcar station in Sweet Auburn, according to Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum. Eleven people were injured, one critically, and a 27-year-old man identified as Santos J. Wyatt was killed.

“We will probably find that the majority of people who were shot overnight on Edgewood were innocent bystanders,” Schierbaum said in a press conference late Monday morning.

In order to address the root cause of these types of shootings, violence intervention advocate Tekesia Shields believes there needs to be more education on gun violence across ages, not just targeted at teens and their parents. 

At the press conference, Schierbaum noted that while teens were involved in shootings this weekend, so were adults in their 50s and 60s. The preliminary investigation hasn’t found any indication that the shooting was gang related, but Schierbaum said that it hasn’t been ruled out as a possibility. He anticipates that the police department will be releasing surveillance footage soon so that the public can help investigators identify four suspects in the violent encounter.

“There is definitely a narrative that all violence that’s been going on in the community is by teenagers, and it’s not,” Shields said.

Violence intervention work 

In 2017, after her own son was arrested and incarcerated, Shields founded Mothers Against Gang Violence, a nonprofit that provides counseling, mentorship, and support to teens and their parents.

She believes there ought to be more institutional support for organizations like hers that are trying to do the work to keep youth on the right track, not only through community outreach but also by providing wraparound services.

“We get invited to speak at the schools, which is great, but these kids hear from dozens of speakers and community organizations every year,” Shields told Capital B Atlanta. 

Oftentimes these invites come after an incident has already occurred.

“Speaking [one time] and being consistent are two different things,” she said. “We provide wraparound services, and it’s very hard for us to get in the schools to provide that.”

Funding and mountains of paperwork are two of the largest barriers Shields says she and her organization face. In addition, Shields also serves as a credible messenger — people who have a history or background in gun violence and are trained as mentors to influence members of their own community to promote alternative conflict resolution tools and break the cycle of violence. 

While many credible messengers are formerly incarcerated people or former gang-members, Shields is neither. Nonetheless, she said, she sometimes experiences skepticism and pushback from schools. However, she said she doesn’t believe that a person’s past should prevent them from trying to make a positive change in their community.

Weekend of violence

Monday morning’s mass shooting capped off a weekend of shootings around the city.

Schierbaum said the Atlanta Police Department is also investigating 12 other shootings that occurred between Friday and Monday morning that took two lives and left 29 people injured.

“We haven’t had a weekend like this in a long time,” Dickens said at the Monday morning press conference.

While police haven’t discovered the motive behind the Edgewood shooting, Schierbaum noted that the catalyst to the other shootings included a dispute over a car-booting, a nephew who killed his uncle, and multiple domestic violence disputes.

“Individuals had guns when they were angry, [which] seems to be the most common theme we saw throughout the weekend,” he said.

Though Dickens and Schierbaum highlighted the success they’ve had over the past year reducing homicides by 32% and shootings by 20%, they acknowledged at the press conference that this weekend shows how much more progress needs to be made.

There have been 57 homicides in Atlanta so far in 2025. Last year at this time there had been 76, and by this time in 2022, there had been 92.

“We still have work to do,” Schierbaum said. “Anger, conflict resolution, and access to guns by individuals that should not have them is still a matter that we all need to address.”

The victims in Monday’s mass shooting were transported to Grady Memorial Hospital. Some have already been released, according to Mayor Andre Dickens.