Police: Woman Not Intended Target In Drive-By

Published: 08/20/2011 | Updated: 07/19/2023

ATLANTA — Investigators say they are searching for the person who fatally shot a 23-year-old woman in a drive-by shooting Friday night. Police said Julian Jones was walking with two men along Macon Drive in southeast Atlanta just before 10 p.m. Friday, when a dark-colored SUV pulled up and fired several shots at them.

Police said the mother of four was shot in the upper leg. The bullet hit an artery, and she later died at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Friends, family, and the Jones’ children gathered Saturday to try and make sense of it.

Channel 2’s George Howell spoke with family members. Jones’s fiancé, Harel Butler, said only one of Jones’ children comprehends that their mother is not coming back.

“The oldest one, the one that will be four in December, she kind of got an idea. But the babies do not have an idea. She wakes up in the morning hollering for her mom,” Butler said. She don’t understand that her mom is gone.”

Police said Jones was walking home, according to witnesses, when someone opened fire.

Detectives believe she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, the unintended target of a gunman, trying to shoot someone else.

“You took the mother from four children. She was a good woman, she didn’t bother anybody,” Jones’s mother, June Woods, said.

Detectives told Howell that they were following up on leads as friends and family mourn a senseless loss.

“I have a 4-year-old who asks me every day, why didn’t my mom take me with her? She wanted to go with her mom. And this one right here woke up in the middle of the night, ‘I want mommy.’ So, they fully didn’t understand,'” Butler said.