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Union City, Georgia – A Black man has been arrested for the brutal gunshot murder of his Lyft driver. According to reports, the suspect was a disgraced Atlanta Police Officer who claimed his victim tried to kidnap and recruit him into a “gay fraternity.”
Officer Koby Minor of the Atlanta Police Department was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and murder after police say he opened fire on a Black rideshare driver. Authorities arrived on the scene a little after midnight, where they found 35-year-old Reginald Folks of Atlanta dead from his injuries.
According to reports, Folks, a Black professional wrestler who drove for Lyft as a means to earn extra income, was driving Minor home at the time of the incident. Minor, a US Marine Corps Veteran, was said to have worked as an Atlanta Police Officer since 2018 but immediately resigned after his murder arrest.
The Atlanta Police Department released a statement about the former officer. Last year, Minor was placed on unpaid administrative leave after he allegedly crashed his car. During a search, responding officers found he may have been under the influence and in possession of around 20 Xanax pills.
“At the time of his arrest in Union City, Minor was on unpaid administrative leave after being arrested in Milton, GA, in December 2023,” the Atlanta Police said in a statement.
“Minor was relieved of his department-issued firearm upon being placed on unpaid administrative leave. Since that time, the firearm has remained in the custody of the APD,” it continued.
An arrest affidavit asserts that Folks began to talk on a phone in a different language during the ride. Minor told authorities that he asked Folks to stop the vehicle, but instead continued to drive. Minor said he attempted to exit the vehicle during a red light, but when Folks turned around in his seat, Minor opened fire, shooting Folks in the head.
Minor was then said to have broken the window and fled. A woman who approached the crime scene told detectives that she had spoken to Minor, who she observed waving his arms in the air. Minor apparently told her that Folks was attempting to kidnap and recruit him into a so-called “gay fraternity.”
According to Folks’s family, the Lyft driver moved to the city to pursue an education at Clark Atlanta University and had recently started a career as a professional wrestler.
(I’m) very proud of the man he became. Everywhere I went, people met him and enjoyed him. ” Marchelle Folks said in an interview with 11 Alive, ” he always ran into people he knew. “He was a friendly guy, very social. Reggie was pretty much the life of the party.”
“He was my oldest, 35,” she continued. “I just talked to him on Mother’s Day, and he had just talked to his brother for three hours. We are heartbroken about the entire thing.”
Union City, a former railroad junction in Fulton County, Georgia, is considered a thoroughly Black region of the United States. According to the 2020 US Census report, Union City residents make up a whopping 84.55% of the population, with Whites a distant minority at only 4.55%.
Black Americans employed in positions key to a functioning society often become implicated in particularly heinous crimes and other scandals. In 2017, Black Minneapolis Police officer Mohamed Noor shot and killed White 40-year-old Justine Damond, who approached his squad car after calling 911.
Noor had been hailed as one of the first Somali-American police officers in the area, and for the crime of murdering a White woman in cold blood, would be sentenced to only 57 months behind bars.
In April, a Black cop in Indianapolis, Indiana, was arrested after he was accused of using his badge to solicit sex from numerous victims of crimes he had personally responded to. The officer, identified as 27-year-old Myron Howard, was charged with rape, official misconduct, and several other crimes.
Just this month, a Black police chief in Houston, Texas, was forced to resign after it came to light that, under his watch, over 264,000 incident reports had never been investigated. The shocking development would leave many to question the veracity of Houston’s recent and widely applauded decrease in crime.
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