ATLANTA — The family of the man charged in a deadly stabbing on the Atlanta Beltline is speaking out for the first time, apologizing to the victim’s loved ones and calling for changes they say could prevent similar tragedies.
In an open letter to Atlanta residents and officials, the family of 54-year-old Johnathan Hamby said they are “deeply” sorry to the family of 29-year-old Ramon Harris.
Atlanta police say Hamby and Harris got into an argument on a busy section of the Beltline near Ponce City Market before Hamby allegedly stabbed Harris, killing him.
Hamby’s family says he has a severe mental illness that causes psychosis and leads him to believe people around him are planning to attack him.
The family says Hamby has more than 30 previous arrests and argues he should not have been allowed to remain in public with access to a weapon. They blame what they describe as a “broken system” and say the court system ignored previous pleas from the family to establish a safety plan to prevent Hamby from harming others.
The family says it previously tried to get the courts to intervene and allow family members to make decisions on Hamby’s behalf, but those efforts were unsuccessful.
Now, the family is calling on Georgia lawmakers to pass legislation that would give families of people with severe mental illness a way to make certain decisions on their behalf. They say such changes could help prevent similar tragedies in the future.
The Hamby family’s full letter is below:
To the Atlanta Community, Neighbors, and Leadership,
We are writing this letter with a profound sense of heartbreak, grief, and accountability. Yesterday, a horrific act of violence shattered our community on the Atlanta Beltline. The pain inflicted upon the victim, their family, and every person who witnessed or was impacted by this tragedy is immeasurable. As the family of the suspect, Johnathan Hamby, we want to say directly to the victim’s family and to all of Atlanta: we are deeply, unreservedly sorry.
Our family is trapped in the agonizing reality of knowing that we spent years desperately fighting a broken system to prevent this exact tragedy from happening.
Johnathan lives with a severe mental illness (SMI) that causes active psychosis. In his reality, he is under constant, terrifying attack from bystanders who are simply walking near him. He cannot rationally process the world, nor can he recognize his own illness – a clinical reality known as anosognosia, which affects up to 50% of individuals with severe schizophrenia or bipolar disorders. Because of this, court orders instructing him to simply take his medication or follow rules are impossible for his compromised brain to execute.
The question our community is asking is entirely justified: Why was a convicted felon with 30+ arrest cycles on the street, and why did he have weapons? This is a question our family has been asking for years.
He was on the street because our current legal system relies on a revolving door of short-term incarceration rather than long-term structural intervention. Johnathan has a history of over 30 prior arrests, and a majority of these as individual acts should have served as a high-risk warning to officials. For example, he recently took a three-foot samurai saber into a Chamblee elementary school under the delusional premise that this act was required because he simply needed to charge his cellular phone. The system treated this clear, high-risk warning sign as a standard misdemeanor. He was briefly jailed, released, and put back on the street without stabilized care.
During these prior arrest cycles, our family begged the courts to intervene. We did not ask to strip his humanity away; we asked for a legal mechanism to step in and save him – and the community – from his delusions. We begged the courts to establish a Structured Decision-Making (SDM) plan.
An SDM plan is a framework society already uses successfully to protect individuals with advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. When a medical condition strips a person of their executive functioning, the law allows a willing, accountable family unit to step in and manage high-risk decisions. For Johnathan, an SDM plan would have legally empowered our family to prevent him from purchasing weapons, secure his housing, and enforce treatment compliance before a crisis occurred. Instead, the courts repeatedly dismissed our pleas, citing strict legal thresholds regarding immediate danger.
Johnathan’s case is a tragic symptom of a statewide and national failure. Data from the Treatment Advocacy Center shows that a tiny fraction of individuals with untreated SMI cycle continuously through the justice system – with just 10% of these “super-utilizer” cases accounting for up to 70% of psychiatric emergency and jail intake resources. Our current laws offer only two extremes: brief jail stays that treat psychiatric illness as a crime, or total guardianship, which is incredibly difficult to secure and often resisted by the courts.
We cannot undo the horror of yesterday. But we refuse to let the system continue this broken cycle for other families who are currently begging for help before a tragedy strikes.
We are calling on Georgia lawmakers to introduce and pass legislation establishing a Family-Led Structured Decision-Making Act. This law would create a specific legal pathway in Georgia courts for individuals with severe, treatment-resistant psychiatric illnesses who have a history of weapons or school-safety violations. Georgia can easily implement this framework because the legal foundation already exists. By simply bridging our state’s current Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) courts with the Structured Decision-Making blueprints used across the country, Georgia can lead the nation. When a willing, capable family is present, the courts must have the power to mandate an SDM proxy. This allows accountability to be placed where it belongs – in a structured, human-managed plan that controls high-risk variables like weapon acquisition and treatment adherence.
Our family tried to build a dam with our bare hands to protect the community from the tragedy that occurred yesterday, but the system washed it away. We ask our community and our legislators to join us in building a real legal framework that protects the public, empowers desperate families, and prevents another preventable tragedy from destroying innocent lives and shattering our communities again.
We are providing this statement on the condition of anonymity. Please do not attempt to publish our names or contact details. We want the focus to remain strictly on the apology to the victim and his family and the greater Atlanta community, as well as the proposed legislative solution to prevent a similar tragedy in the future.
With deepest sorrow and a commitment to change to prevent a similar future tragedy,
The Hamby Family