An Atlanta police officer is accused of allegedly stealing hundreds of dollars from the wallet of man shot and killed, the department said Friday.
A woman who tried to help the man told Channel 2 Action News she looked in his wallet to find out his name when she saw him near a northwest Atlanta intersection Wednesday. That’s when she saw the cash.
“It was a stack probably about this big and there was a smaller stack underneath, so it had to be five or six hundred dollars, or maybe even more,” Leilani Collier told Channel 2.
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When investigators arrived at the Marietta Road crime scene, Collier said she handed the wallet over to an officer.
“I gave the officer his wallet, just how I pulled it out of his pocket is the way I gave it to her, and I was like, um, this is his ID and his cash and his wallet,” she said.
Jamel Harris, a married father, died from his injuries after being shot in the head. Collier said she wanted his widow to know about the cash he’d had.
But Lanique Harris, pregnant with the couple’s second child, told Channel 2 she was told there was no cash.
“When I asked them about it, they said there was no money,” Harris said. “We have a mortgage to pay. We have funeral expenses. He didn’t have life insurance, just that money would have really helped us.”
Lanique Harris said her husband had been on a work trip to Tennessee, and when the job ended, he was paid in cash. On Thursday, police arrested the man accused of killing Jamel Harris. An-Nur Green, 43, was charged with murder.
An Atlanta police spokesman said the department is investigating the incident.
“We are aware of this accusation and are taking it seriously,” APD said. “The Office of Professional Standards has opened an investigation into the matter and the officer has been placed into a non-law enforcement capacity until further investigation.”
The officer’s name was not released while the department conducts its investigation.
