Alexis Crawford: How the trial of murdered Atlanta University student exposes law enforcement's shortcomings
The new docuseries 'Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children' outlined the Atlanta Child Murders, a slew of slayings of young black children in Atlanta, Georgia, that shocked the country to its core. 29 children were kidnapped and brutally murdered, between 1980 and 1982, and only one suspect emerged from the cases who was taken into custody and given two consecutive life sentences for murders that hadn't been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, were his doing.
Wayne Williams was tried at court and convicted of two of the 29 murders, but merely two days after his sentencing, the police attributed the rest of the murders to Williams (even without solid evidence) and closed the case, with no closure for the family of the victims.
The five-part documentary series which dropped earlier this month placed emphasis on the impact these murders had on the black community as well as other citizens of Atlanta and how the law enforcement handled these murders. Although 40 years later, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Police Chief Erika Shields have reopened the cold case to remedy the law enforcement's faults by carrying out a new investigation, similar failures still persist.
ZORA's Clarissa Brooks has penned down an article that she deems personal to her, shedding light on the failure of the city's multiple institutions in the case of Clark Atlanta University student, Alexis Crawford who was murdered in October 2019. Crawford, 21, was a criminal justice major and lived with her roommate, Jordyn Jones. Crawford went missing on October 26 after a falling out with her roommate, and her body was discovered a week later on November 8, in Exchange Park in Dekalb County. Mutual friends of the two roommates were aware that the two didn't share an amicable relationship, yet they spent homecoming together, celebrating and socializing with their peers at the end of the fall semester.
If the child murders are anything to go, black women and girls go missing quite often in Atlanta. In fact, just days after Crawford vanished, another young woman named Lateisha Edwards went missing for several days before she was found and returned home safely. However, thousands of missing cases of black women remain unsolved in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Search parties were organized across southwest Atlanta to look for Crawford by her friends and family, something that resonated with similar efforts that were undertaken 40 years ago to investigate the Atlanta Child Murders. The Atlanta Police Department, which was blamed for its negligence back then, came under public scrutiny again, because they felt like they weren't taking Crawford's sudden disappearance seriously. “If we the citizens have to be detectives and mentors and have to do the forensic files, then that’s what we’re gonna do,” Sabrina Peterson, a local activist and mentor who led the search, said in November 2019. Dozens of people from across Atlanta volunteered to be a part of the search efforts, and while they scoured for Crawford's whereabouts, they hoped she would return safely.
Jones confessed to being an accomplice in the murder of her roommate alongside her boyfriend, Barron Brantley on November 8, 2019. Jones and Brantley have both pleaded not guilty to the charges of murder, two counts of felony, aggravated assaults, false imprisonment, and concealing the death of another.
After Crawford's body was recovered and the information was made public knowledge. Clark Atlanta University, one of Atlanta's historically black colleges (HBCU), released a statement saying: “Investigators say this was an isolated, off-campus incident and there was never a threat to any other members of the community.” The Institution is presently under a Title IX lawsuit, for the way it handles reported cases of misbehavior and violence experienced by students living on and off-campus. Although Crawford's murder was isolated as neither of the students lived on campus, this shows that the university would not be a safe haven for victims of sexual violence to report assaults, as in the case of Tayler Mathews, a PhD student.
Mathews filed a civil rights lawsuit against the university for mishandling her sexual harassment complaint by a male graduate student. “I didn’t want to take it here,” she said about the civil rights lawsuit against the university that she filed in August 2017. “I really thought they would take care of this,” Mathews told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the university impeded her graduate school performance based on the retaliation from the faculty. There has reportedly been a hike in HBCU students across the US, asking their alma maters to show up for survivors especially during homecoming, which is a high-risk time for violence.
After returning from escorting ones at Homecoming, her boyfriend, Brantley allegedly sexually assaulted Crawford in her bathroom on October 26, per police records. The two roommates lived on McDaniel Street, located a few minutes away from their university, where Jones found Brantley in the midst of assaulting her roommate. Brantley reportedly said to Jones, “I didn’t touch her. I didn’t rape her," as reports also indicate that Crawford was unconscious during the attack.
While Jones and Brantley were engaged in a heated argument, Crawford gained consciousness and confided in a close friend about the assault. The friend then called the police and Crawford was taken to the hospital to get a rape kit administered that very night at Grady Hospital. Following their altercation, Jones stormed out of the house and Brantley followed taking Jones' keys and car with him. Jones reported her stolen car and by the end of the night, she had reconciled with her boyfriend, the latter having sneaked into their apartment without Crawford's knowledge. Halloween night, four days after the assault, Crawford and Jones got into a heated argument about the former's assault, which resulted in Brantley showing up from hiding in Jones'room and allegedly choking Crawford to death.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compiled data in the National Violent Reporting System and formulated a report in 2017 that said the homicide rate for black women between 2003 and 2014 was 4.4 per 100,000, with Native American women at 4.3 per 100,000. Moreover, the report said that 55 percent of those deaths were caused by domestic violence and a majority were carried out by a male partner. No one truly knows the truth to the happenings that night, but the police report states that the reason Crawford and Jones' friendship went downhill was because of the emotional abuse and sexual harassment that Jones endured under Brantley, which ultimately went unchecked.
Hundreds of Clark Atlanta University students gathered on the streets in front of the student center to honor Crawford, at a vigil that had been organized in her memory. While campus police, the Atlanta Police Department, school officials, and close friends of the disease spoke fondly of the deceased young woman, many also spoke of Crawford and Jones's presumably toxic friendship. “A lot of students have been trying to take in what happened and try to find answers to something we can’t find answers to,” Levon Campbell Jr, the undergraduate president of the Student Government Association at Clark Atlanta said. “The mood has been very hard.”
Crawford's death sparked concern among other students who began to worry about their safety and well being on campus. “I’m not really sure how other people are reacting to it or how they are feeling about it, but it makes me feel kind of uneasy,” Camille Dash, a Clark Atlanta student, said to 11Alive. “The reasoning for why these institutions cannot resolve these issues has led to larger conversations about poor funding to HBCUs, the seeming lack of understanding of restorative justice to those accused of sexual violence, expectations regarding who carries the weight of black liberation — women and queer folks — and how administrations of HBCUs nationally are run by an old guard,” said Clarissa Brooks, an alum of Spelman, another HCBU college, in a 2017 op-ed in Teen Vogue.
The death of Crawford, a woman in prime, going unnoticed as it did points at failures in multiple systems that are supposed to be safeguarding and protecting the vulnerable and those who have experienced harm. "Living in a world that already sees black women as disposable and unworthy of being victims of violence is the cause for lack of reporting. It is the reason black women endure experiences of violence for the sake of not wanting to be victimized in ways that could cause them secondary harm", Brooks writes in her ZORA article.
Crawford's murder trial is an ongoing ordeal and is reminiscent of the trial for the Atlanta Child Murders from 1983 which are highlighted in the new documentary series. It exposes the shortcomings of Atlanta's legal system and how possibly their recklessness and rush to simply close the case has destroyed the life of an innocent that's paying for the mistakes he didn't do.