RIVERDALE, Georgia -- For most of his career, Riverdale Police Maj. Greg Barney could look right across the street from his headquarters at a brick and stucco apartment complex that had long had a reputation for crime.
Ever since the 1990s the complex was known as a place where a drug dealer might set up shop.
Whether a call for service came from there or some place else in Clayton County, Barney wanted to be among the first to respond, his former coworkers said. Back when he was a patrol officer his fellow officers nicknamed him 'G Money' because his uniform was always freshly pressed, his hair freshly cut, his gold jewelry sparkled. But they also called him that because he wanted to be there to make the arrest.
From patrolman, to school resource officer, to sergeant, lieutenant, to major, to acting chief, Barney kept rising. The apartment complex changed too, but for the most part in name only. At the start of Barney's career it was called Chateau Forest. Most recently it was dubbed The Villages on the River. Late Thursday morning Clayton County Police Department's narcotics unit was about to serve a no-knock warrant on a unit in The Villages. Riverdale police were there for back up. Barney was among them.
Clayton County approached from the front. The suspect ran out the back. He got about 200 feet away when he encountered Barney, Riverdale Police Chief Michael Register said. There, just a short walk away from Barney's office, the suspect allegedly shot the 19-year veteran of the force in the torso. A Clayton County officer in turn shot the suspect, who police have not named, critically injuring him.
Barney later died in surgery at Southern Regional Medical Center, where his wife and twin teen-aged sons had gathered. He was the first officer in Georgia this year to die in the line of duty and the second metro Atlanta law officer to be shot in a month. He was also one of five officers across the nation who've been killed in the line of duty in the last four days, according to a report from CNN.
And late Thursday afternoon, two police officers were shot on I-75 in Crisp County, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Their conditions were not known late last night.
"I have buried a lot of friends, but this one, it just hurts," said Alex Manning, a former Riverdale investigator who is now an Atlanta attorney. "Greg could run like a damn gazelle so I'm sure he saw the guy running and thought he was gonna catch him."
Denise Burson was asleep Thursday morning when she was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire outside her bedroom window at The Villages.
"I looked [out of the window] and saw the SWAT team," Burson said. "I heard somebody say 'Get down! Get down get down!' Next thing I know they had a police officer on a stretcher and he's bleeding from his stomach. I saw blood coming out of the white gauze they had around his stomach. They put him in the ambulance."
Riverdale Mayor Evelyn Wynn-Dixon called Thursday's shooting "a horrific loss."
"He was one of my most dependable officers. He was really fantastic," Wynn-Dixon said. "He will be thoroughly missed."
Riverdale Police Chief Todd Spivey was unavailable for comment late Thursday.
'He did what he was supposed to do'
All afternoon and into the early evening, however, Barney's former colleagues talked about their friend, recalling a man who even though he wanted to be there first, "wasn't a super risk taker," as Manning said. "He was just a good cop."
And he always looked like money. That's how former Riverdale police Det. Greg Franklin described Barney. Always clean cut and sharply dressed even off duty.
"There was never a dull moment with him," Franklin said. He recalled working an undercover operation with Barney back in the 1990s along Metropolitan Parkway. A low-level drug dealer walked up to their unmarked car and offered to sell them some crack, Franklin said.
"G Money told him, 'No, we don't want no crack, man. We're the 'popo,' " Franklin recalled.
He was also streetwise in a way some cops weren't, something other officers relied on, said Franklin.
Eddie Todd, a former Clayton County police officer, said he not only knew when to deploy his street smarts, Barney knew when to play it by the book. Todd said Barney was the kind of cop you wanted to back you up on a call. He recalled being a motorcycle officer and stopping a car with four suspects inside along I-85. He called for backup and Barney showed up.
"Most officers would have pulled up behind me," Todd said. "He positioned his vehicle so that he was almost blocking me from them. It was a text book move. He did what he was supposed to do. He just knew what to do without having to think about it."
Which is why Franklin, Todd and Manning are puzzled over the report that Barney was not wearing his bullet-proof vest when he went to The Villages on Thursday. Some speculated that because he had ascended to the rank of major, he probably spent more time in the office than on the streets.
"He always wore his vest, so when we heard he wasn't wearing his vest it didn't make sense," Todd said. "If he was out he had his vest on."
As word of Barney's death spread across the law enforcement community, Franklin said he asked the same question as Todd. "I asked one of our other friends, 'What in the world was G money doing out there without a vest on,' " Franklin said. "He said, 'The same thing you or I would have been doing.' When something's going on, you want to be in the middle of it."
Copyright 2016 - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
