On Saturday, a stray bullet almost hit the nephew of former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in a family member’s home.
According to Bottoms, while her nephew was laying in his bed, “someone fired a gun in the air and the bullet penetrated the wall of the house – coming ‘inches away’ from hitting her nephew.”
Afterward, Bottoms took to social media displaying pictures of the bullet hole in her nephew’s room’s wall, tweeting “What goes up must come down. Someone fired a gun in the air, likely miles away, and it came thru the house into my nephew’s room. He was in the bed inches away. We are grateful that God protected him. If you have a gun, please act responsibly. This could be you or your child.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first brush with gun violence for the Bottoms family—on June 13, 2014 Bottoms lost another nephew after 18-year-old Darius Bottoms “was shot in his car in a case of mistaken identity,” whose murder was recently profiled on Oxygen’s “The Real Murders of Atlanta” in episode 6.
It is unclear if Bottoms was in the house at the time of the shooting, and the exact location of the home is unknown; but, per local Fox news outlet, “[i]njuries and deaths caused by random and celebratory gunfire has been an issue in metro Atlanta in the past,” citing how in January of this year, a sleeping baby was almost struck when a stray bullet hit the baby’s family’s house located in Lithonia.
In 2022, Georgia Governor “Brian Kemp made it legal for individuals to carry a concealed gun without a permit in the state of Georgia.”
Bottoms served as Atlanta’s 60th mayor from 2018 to 2022 and elected not to run for a second term when she accepted a role in the Biden administration as director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, before officially stepping down this past April.