The Buckhead City Committee will open a headquarters for its cityhood campaign with a free Halloween event open to the public. But, underscoring the group’s public-safety pitch, also featured will be two prominent crime victims and former Atlanta Police Department officers said to have quit due to being “demonized.”
The headquarters will be located at 3002 Peachtree Road, at the intersection with Pharr Road, in Peachtree Heights West. The Oct. 31 grand opening is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., with RSVPs requested through a Google form. A ribbon-cutting is scheduled for noon.
The event will feature food trucks, music, “lots of candy” and “Buckhead City swag,” according to a promotional email. Also featured is Halloween costume contest in categories of “cutest,” “funniest” and “scariest” to be judged “by our men and women in uniform.”
BCC chairman and CEO Bill White said in a previous email to group supporters that among those conducting the headquarters ribbon-cutting would be crime victims Eliana Kovitch and Jason Eades and APD officer Ivory Streeter, though White now indicates that Streeter will be unavailable.
Streeter is one of several APD officers involved in a controversial incident last year where they pulled two people from a vehicle and used Tasers on them for allegedly violating a protest-related curfew. Streeter was fired but reinstated on grounds that his due-process rights were violated, and also faces assault-type criminal charges in a case that Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr transferred from the Fulton County District Attorney’s office to a special prosecutor.
White said in an email that Streeter is among the “great officers whose lives reputations and livelihoods being used at political footballs.” He said the grand opening “will feature officers who have quit APD (over this incident) and the way APD has been demonized and villain-ized.”
Kovitch and Eades are victims of a Buckhead street attack last year who have featured as supporters in some cityhood press coverage. The couple were threatened and beaten by a man who allegedly referred to them being white. White, the BCC chief, calls it an “obvious hate crime” but says that “investigators told her she was the wrong color for a hate crime.” White also claimed the FBI is “looking at” whether the Fulton D.A.’s office is violating Kovitch’s rights in the handling of the case.
Jeff DiSantis, a spokesperson for the D.A.’s office, said that Kovitch and Eades have been given a “large amount of attention” by prosecutors and that White’s claims are untrue.
“Those claims are absolutely untrue and their lack of credibility is self-evident,” said DiSantis in a written statement. “No such statement regarding a hate crimes prosecution was made by anyone in this office, and Mr. White’s claim about the FBI is absurd. He is doing his personal credibility and his cause a disservice with such blatant lying.”
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Atlanta office said the agency does not confirm or deny the existence of any investigation.
The email to supporters said that some legislators also are invited, with “many” accepting. “Police chiefs and members” of various police forces are also expected to attend, including from the Georgia State Patrol and the Atlanta, Brookhaven, Sandy Springs and South Fulton forces. GSP, APD and SSPD spokespeople said they were unaware of the event and expect any officer attendance would be unofficial.
The BCC headquarters site is a long-vacant building that once housed a Three Dollar Cafe restaurant. Portman Holdings last year announced plans to redevelop the site with two towers containing a luxury hotel and apartments.
Update: This story has been updated with comment from the Fulton County District Attorney’s office and information about the headquarters site.
