Georgia Today: Deadly shootings in Macon; Savannah PD trained on LGBTQ hate crimes; Atlanta author

Orlando Montoya: Hello and welcome to the Georgia Today podcast. Here we bring you the latest reports from the GPB News team. On today's episode, Macon police are investigating two recent shootings which claimed the lives of four people. The Savannah Pride Center trains city police how to identify and respond to LGBTQ hate crimes. And in an Atlanta author's new memoir, she compares her story with that of legendary English novelist Virginia Woolf.

Heather Crystal: This book went through many drafts. And so it required me to turn back to some of the difficult moments of my life again and again.

Orlando Montoya: Today is Tuesday, May 20. I'm Orlando Montoya, and this is Georgia Today.

Story 1:

Orlando Montoya: The Macon-Bibb County Sheriff's Office is asking for help from federal law enforcement agencies to investigate two recent shootings that killed four people and wounded many more. GPB's Grant Blankenship has more.

Grant Blankenship: Those killed, mostly men in their 20s, died over two days of violence last weekend in Macon. Three of the deaths occurred at a daiquiri bar where investigators say the sheer number of rounds fired meant a number of other people were also shot and required medical care. The Bibb County Sheriff's Office says, following their request, they're now being assisted by the FBI, ATF, DEA, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. While the shootings doubled the total homicides in Macon so far for 2025, the pace of killing is still half what it was at the same time last year and only about a third of what it was by May of 2022 near the peak of the national homicide boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. For GPB News, I'm Grant Blankenship in Macon.

Story 2:

Orlando Montoya: The Savannah Pride Center is partnering with the city's police department to conduct officer training on how better to identify and respond to hate crimes against LGBTQ people. GPB's Benjamin Payne reports.

Benjamin Payne: The announcement comes two months after the shooting death of Chris Ventress, a Savannah Pride Center volunteer who was allegedly murdered at a dollar store by a man who yelled anti-gay slurs. The Savannah Police Department's handling of the killing came under criticism after investigators declined to classify the incident as a hate crime. Michael Bell is executive director of the Savannah Pride Center and says the new training program is meant to help police officers.

Michael Bell: Not only understand terminology, the culture, the history, but it's also understanding crimes involving the LGBTQ+ community, educating around bias incidents and what that looks like because we wanna be able to turn the corner on reporting hate crimes here in Savannah.

Benjamin Payne: Georgia lawmakers passed the state's first hate crime statute in 2020 in response to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. For GPB News, I'm Benjamin Payne in Savannah.

Caption

Keisha Lance Bottoms

Credit: GPB

Story 3:

Orlando Montoya: Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms officially has launched her campaign to be Georgia's next governor. The 55-year-old Democrat said today her term as mayor gave her the experience needed to serve as the state's chief executive. She's the second Democrat to announce a run for the office, currently held by Republican Brian Kemp, who can't run again at the end of his second term. Democratic Atlanta state Sen. Jason Estevez announced his gubernatorial campaign in April.

Story 4:

Orlando Montoya: For some rural Georgia towns, revitalization starts with looking to the past. In the town of Winterville, near Athens, the Old Blacksmith Shop, which opened its doors in the 1800s, is getting a facelift. But it's not becoming a museum. It's set to become the town's only grocery store, where a collective of local farmers will sell fresh produce to the residents of this food desert. WUGA's Emma Auer has more on how the town is looking to its future by preserving its past.

Emma Auer: In the middle of historic Winterville, a few miles east of Athens, a brown shack covered in lichen is surrounded by bright caution tape. A few steps away is the gray ribbon of the Firefly Trail. That 39-mile walking and biking path that connects Athens and Union Point was once a part of the Georgia Railroad. It made a good location for this blacksmith shop, it turns out.

Jonathan Scott: By being right next to the railroad tracks, we have goods that came in that maybe needed to be assembled or have parts added to them.

Emma Auer: That's Jonathan Scott, the city's cultural heritage director. He was in charge of the archeological dig that took place in the shop this year. The collection of nails, spikes, and bolts he found paints a picture of a small but bustling community in the mid-1800s.

Jonathan Scott: It wasn't a big grandiose affair, but it was very much a story of self-sufficiency.

Emma Auer: Until the railroad took a new path. According to Dodd Ferrell, the mayor of Winterville, the blacksmith shop is about to get a new lease on life.

Dodd Ferrell: So the Marigold Collective, once we're finished the latter part of this year, will inhabit that building and that'll become our hub for the Marigold Market, the food hub and all things Marigold Collective.

Emma Auer: Ferrell helped start the Marigold Collective in 2019. It connects local farmers to consumers through a weekly farmers market. But soon, farmers will have even more opportunity to sell their produce in the renovated blacksmith shop.

Dodd Ferrell: They'll be open all day during the day for our farmers market. So growers and producers that are here just on Saturdays will be able to sell their products all week long.

Emma Auer: The collective has another important function, which it will continue once it moves into its brick and mortar location.

Dodd Ferrell: We'll be able to repurpose the food from there to feed some of the food-insecure families, at least 40 families.

Emma Auer: The collective delivers free food to low-income families between Winterville and the east side of Athens. They also partner with another organization, Wholesome Wave Georgia, so families can use government benefits to buy even more produce. Wayne Campbell is a producer for the collective. On a cloudy weekday, he's working on his family's backyard farm.

Wayne Campbell: We're trying to grow some broccoli, some eggplant and tomatoes.

Emma Auer: Campbell and his wife, Molly, are both veterans. When they got out of the military, they wanted to continue their service.

Wayne Campbell: We decided, well, what if we meet up with local farmers and we see how we can provide or how they provide to the community.

Emma Auer: So Campbell is really excited.

Wayne Campbell: The grocery store is going to provide a means to fund the organization's other missions: food education, feeding the community.

Emma Auer: And, Campbell says, anyone who rides by on the Firefly on the old rail line.

Wayne Campbell: Everybody that uses the trail can stop or anything really at that store and it's going to provide even more into the community.

Emma Auer: Mayor Ferrell says he hopes other Georgia towns will copy their plans.

Dodd Farrell: It's kind of a nice little circle and a blueprint that we're trying to create for other little communities like ours that can come in and create something special like this that's not only a farmer's market but a food hub that serves the food insecure.

Emma Auer: And makes the old Winterville blacksmith shop a place known for self-sufficiency again. For WUGA News, I'm Emma Auer.

Caption

Measles

Credit: GPB / File

Story 5:

Orlando Montoya: Georgia has its fourth measles case of the year. The state Department of Public Health yesterday confirmed an unvaccinated metro Atlanta resident got the virus while traveling internationally. The agency is working to identify anyone who might have been in contact with the individual when the person was infectious. As of last week, the CDC reported about 1,000 cases so far this year, the majority in Texas. The best way to avoid getting measles is to get a vaccination.

Story 6:

Orlando Montoya: Weather forecasters are urging Georgians to be weather-aware tonight. A cold front will push a line of potentially severe thunderstorms through the state. The greatest risk is expected between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m., starting in northwest Georgia and moving south and east.

Story 7:

Orlando Montoya: Cargo traffic at Georgia ports continued to be driven by shippers moving goods early to avoid looming tariffs. The Georgia Ports Authority today reported its busiest-ever April for container trade, with traffic at the Port of Savannah increasing 17% over April last year. April cargo traffic at Port of Brunswick, however, was not as encouraging. CEO Griff Lynch attributed a 22% decline at Brunswick again to shippers, specifically of automobiles and heavy equipment, rushing orders in March.

Griff Lynch: There was a lot of front loading to avoid the tariffs, let's just face it, and March was a record month, so this is a bit of fallout from the tariff side.

Orlando Montoya: Lynch said port operations remain, quote, "business as usual," and he's optimistic the tariff situation will, quote "settle down."

Caption

Home Depot

Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

Story 8:

Orlando Montoya: Home Depot doesn't expect to raise prices because of tariffs. An executive with the Atlanta-based retailer said today the company has spent years diversifying where it sources the goods it sells. Other companies, including Walmart and Subaru, recently have announced plans to raise prices or lower financial expectations for investors based on the Trump administration's tariffs. Home Depot today stuck by earlier sales growth projections of around 2.8%.

Story 9:

Orlando Montoya: The head of a commercial real estate investment firm has been sentenced to 87 months in prison in a fraud scheme involving a 19-story office building in Atlanta. The U.S. Justice Department said today that 46-year-old Ellie Schwartz also has been ordered to pay $45 million in restitution. He pleaded guilty in February to one count of wire fraud after prosecutors alleged he convinced hundreds of investors to send him $62 million. Including $54 million for the landmark building, the Atlanta Financial Center. Instead of using the money for legitimate purposes, he diverted it into buying luxury items for his own use.

Story 10:

Orlando Montoya: Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential authors of the early 20th century. Her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, have inspired other writers and artists. Atlanta author Heather Crystal felt close enough to Woolf to base her own memoir around the English novelist who died in 1941. Crystal joins me now to talk about In the Rhododendrons, an homage to Woolff wrapped in their shared geographies, family dynamics, and traumas. Welcome to GPB.

Heather Crystal: Thank you so much for having me and for spending time with the book.

Orlando Montoya: Let's start with your family history. Your mother is English. And while you grew up in New Hampshire, you visited your English family a lot over the years. How did your English mother's heritage affect your growing up?

Heather Crystal: I think that from a very early age, my sister and I were taught to think of ourselves as at least half English, but probably more. My father was so often away at sea in the merchant marines. And so whenever my mother had the chance and the finances, we would go and visit her parents and my cousins and aunt and uncle. And she would take us around to, you know, sites of cultural interest. And then also sites of family significance, in particular Kew Gardens, which became a landmark site for my imagining of my mother and of her country.

Orlando Montoya: Both Woolf and your mother spent a great deal of time living near Kew Gardens, and the gardens appear throughout the book from beginning to end. I sort of feel like I've gotten a tour of the gardens through your book. Why were you drawn to come back to that location, both personally and as a literary device?

Heather Crystal: It's such a rich site. It leads to so many different kinds of learning. For me, it led to thinking about the personal family history, all of the birthdays that were celebrated there. It led me to thinking about the appearance of Kew Gardens in Wolff's novels and short stories, but also in her diaries and her letters, it shows up as a biographical site.

Orlando Montoya: One of the narratives driving the book forward is your desire to understand what happened when you were 14 years old and sexually assaulted after a London nightclub visit. You write that this journey to clear up memories about the assault almost killed you. How do you see that journey now?

Heather Crystal: I'm thankful that it's done. It was not easy. It was an easy moment to face. And especially not an easy to face again and again and again. This book went through many drafts. And so it required me to turn back to some of the difficult moments of my life again and again. But it also gave me occasion to return to the site of the assault itself: to touch the brick wall that I remember my back against, and to be there as an adult, not as a 14-year-old. Someone who had walked there purposefully and with the company of Wolff and all of the learning that I had done in the meantime.

Orlando Montoya: You ask your family members some very deep questions, not only about the assault, but about everything: their personal histories, their hopes, their disappointments, almost in a journalistic way. And I find that kind of difficult to read because here I am a journalist, and yet I struggle, like many people, to have anything but the safest conversations with family members. So where did you get the strength to ask those questions?

Heather Crystal: I would love to know for certain the answer to that question. I think that there is something in me that when I am working on a book, whether it's poetry or nonfiction, I become connected to a power within myself that I do not know how to access otherwise. And so, it really was art that was asking the questions. The art required it. The art gave me that — it gave me that bravery.

Orlando Montoya: And did the art ask you to break into a National Trust House? The book ends with your breaking into a national trust house in England that was associated with Woolf.

Heather Crystal: So I should just specify for legal purposes that it was the grounds of the estate rather than the house itself. I don't want to get any of my friends in trouble. But yes, I think the art did require that. You know, Wolf's novel Orlando, and I love that your name is Orlando and that I'm speaking about this novel. Woolf novel Orlando ends on the — on a fictionalized version of Knoll House, which is the estate that we broke into at night. And it ends at the stroke of midnight on Oct. 11, 1928. And so as I was working on this book, as I was researching, getting more and more obsessed with Woolf and kind of figuring out how can I get all the way inside her books, it occurred to me that I could go and be there at midnight. I could be inside the last page of that book. And once I had the idea, it just became really irresistible and I was fortunate enough to find misbehaving friends who would come with me.

Orlando Montoya: Did you find what you wanted to about Woolf in all of these visits to these sites?

Heather Crystal: I did, I did. I think that there were a number of moments in the journey that felt like I was coming to a new sense of closeness and understanding and making peace with Woolf and myself and my mother in all of our faults and talents and confusions. I think perhaps the moment when I felt that most strongly was when I was able to go to Woolf's house in Sussex and I picked an apple from her tree, the orchard that grew outside the house where she lived, and I took it to the river and I washed it in the river, And I took a bite. And I think it was the most nourishing apple I have ever eaten in my entire life.

Orlando Montoya: And I think we should say that's the river in which Woolf drowned herself.

Heather Crystal: This is true, and it's the river where she went for walks with her friends and took her dogs out for exercise and walked thinking about the composition of her novel. So it is a river that has one meaning that gets pinned down to the public understanding of Woolf's life. But I would really love for that river to be those other things as well.

Orlando Montoya: Thanks very much, Heather Crystal. Your book is called In the Rhodadendrons". It's been a pleasure reading it and thanks for coming to GPB.

Orlando Montoya: You can listen to GPB's Peter Biello and I talk about In The Rhodadendrons: A Memoir With Appearances By Virginia Woolf,  written by Heather Crystal on the latest episode of Narrative Edge. That's our podcast highlighting great books by Georgia authors or about Georgia subjects with new episodes releasing every two weeks. Find Narrative Edge at GPB.org/podcasts or on your podcast player of choice.

Orlando Montoya: And that's it for today's edition of Georgia Today. If you'd like to learn more about these stories, visit GPB.org/news. If you haven't yet hit subscribe on this podcast, take a moment right now and do that to keep us current in your feed. We always welcome comments, story suggestions and ideas. Our email address is GeorgiaToday@GPB.org. I'm Orlando Montoya. Peter Bielo will be back tomorrow.

---

For more on these stories and more, go to GPB.org/news