The call came in just before 7 a.m. Monday — gunshots on Battle Forrest Drive, a quiet residential street in DeKalb County where most neighbors are elderly and the loudest disruption is usually someone's garbage pickup.

When police arrived at the home, they found a woman with both gunshot and stab wounds. She had been walking her dog.

"I was getting up, getting my grandbaby ready for school, and I heard six to seven shots, so I ran out the door," witness Tiffany Williams told WXIA-TV. "When I ran out the door, I saw the lady across the street with a man standing over her."

What Williams described next added another layer of horror to an already brutal scene. She said the suspect was pulling at the victim's clothing when their eyes met. He was dressed entirely in black. Then he ran.

"I heard the shooting, but I'm not thinking because as a mother and I'm seeing her lying there, I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've got to help her,'" Williams said.

A Trail Across Metro Atlanta

By evening, police had connected this killing to two others that occurred in the hours before dawn.

At a joint media briefing, Brookhaven and DeKalb County police announced the arrest of 26-year-old Olaolukitan Adon Abel following a traffic stop in Troup County. Authorities said Abel was a suspect in all three attacks — a string of violence that began around midnight and stretched across metro Atlanta.

The first victim was a woman shot outside a Checkers restaurant on Wesley Chapel Road at approximately 12:50 a.m. She died later at a hospital.

Just over an hour later, around 2 a.m., someone opened fire on a homeless man sleeping near a Kroger grocery store in Brookhaven. He was shot multiple times and killed.

Then came the attack on Battle Forrest Drive, roughly five hours later.

'This Is a Quiet Area'

The randomness of the violence has left neighbors struggling to process what happened on their street. Battle Forrest Drive isn't the kind of place where people expect to witness murder before breakfast.

Several residents told reporters the neighborhood is peaceful, populated mostly by older people who've lived there for years. The kind of place where you wave to your neighbors, where a woman walking her dog at dawn should be safe.

Williams' instinct was to help, even after witnessing the shooting. That maternal impulse — I've got to help her — speaks to how unthinkable the scene was, how far outside the normal rhythm of the morning.

The DeKalb County Medical Examiner will determine the official cause of death, though the victim suffered injuries from both gunfire and a blade.

Questions Without Answers

What drives someone to kill three people in different locations over the course of seven hours remains unclear. Police have not released a motive or indicated whether the victims were targeted or chosen at random.

The victims appear to have nothing in common beyond their vulnerability: a woman outside a fast-food restaurant after midnight, a homeless man sleeping outdoors, a woman walking her dog in the early morning.

If there's a pattern, it's one of opportunity — people alone, unprotected, going about the ordinary business of living.

Abel's arrest came swiftly once police connected the incidents, but the speed of justice does little to ease the shock in neighborhoods now forced to reckon with senseless violence. For the residents of Battle Forrest Drive, the quiet has been broken in a way that won't easily mend.