Attorneys for a veteran Atlanta police officer charged with murder in the 2019 shooting of an unarmed man say he feared for his life and the lives of his FBI colleagues after tracking the “dangerous fugitive” to a bedroom closet.
A self-defense hearing for Sung Kim began Tuesday at the federal courthouse in downtown Atlanta. Kim, a 26-year veteran of the police department, killed Jimmy Atchison on Jan. 22, 2019, while working on an FBI fugitive task force.
Atchison, a 21-year-old father of two, was wanted for allegedly stealing a woman’s cellphone at gunpoint, but he did not have a weapon on him when he was killed, investigators found.
The Black man’s fatal shooting sparked protests in Atlanta and policy changes within the city’s police department after it was revealed that federal task force members were not allowed to wear body cameras.
Credit: Christina Matacotta
Credit: Christina Matacotta
In the wake of Atchison’s killing, the Atlanta Police Department withdrew its officers from federal task forces. Those partnerships resumed after a change in federal policy allowing local task force officers to wear them.
Several current and former task force members testified Tuesday that Atchison hid under a pile of clothes and ignored officers’ commands to surrender after leading them on a chase through three separate apartments in a northwest Atlanta complex.
Kim, the closest officer to the closet where Atchison was hiding, shot the wanted man in the face after agents said Atchison quickly raised his arm in a threatening manner.
“I believed he was raising a gun,” said special agent Matthew Winn, one of several law enforcement officers tasked with finding Atchison nearly six years ago and arresting him.
“It happened so fast I didn’t have time to shoot,” Winn said on the stand, adding that he would have fired his gun if Kim hadn’t shot Atchison first. “It is my opinion that he posed a deadly threat when he raised his hand.”
Kim retired from the Atlanta Police Department months after the deadly shooting. He was indicted in late 2022 on charges of felony murder, aggravated assault, involuntary manslaughter and two counts of violating his oath of office.
Former Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard had said he was prepared to seek charges against Kim in March 2020, but that became impossible after COVID-19 suspended virtually all grand jury proceedings in the state for more than a year.
When current DA Attorney Fani Willis took office the following year, she said her staff was working through a “large backlog” of police use-of-force incidents. She has since indicted numerous current and former law enforcement officers in years-old cases.
Kim’s attorney, Don Samuel, successfully had his client’s case moved to federal court last year, citing the former officer’s role with the FBI’s Atlanta Metropolitan Major Offender Task Force. Kim has pleaded not guilty.
The three-day self-defense hearing is set to resume Wednesday.
About the Author
