SOUTH FULTON, Ga. — The embattled City of South Fulton Mayor Khalid Kamau is again in the spotlight after being arrested for trespassing and charged with burglary. Still, many South Fulton residents are rallying behind him.
“He’s exposing them and people don’t like to be exposed,” Reshard Snellings said, a friend of Kamau.
Snellings is among several coming to the mayor’s deference after his recently arrested.
”From what I understand, he was on somebody’s property and all of a sudden, he gets charged with criminal trespassing, and then he also got charged with a felony for burglary when he didn’t touch anything," he said. "A lot of people think this is a setup."
According to Snellings, this isn't the first time that the mayor was allegedly targeted for speaking out. He said that Khalid stood out on the steps of the Camelot Apartments, a troubled complex in metro Atlanta, exposing "the correction in the police department."
Snellings said that a charter commission meeting was called where they decided to remove the mayor.
“If he had been anyone else, they would’ve released him on his own recognizance,” Jewel Johnson, a City of South Fulton Community Activist, said in an exclusive interview.
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Though Johnson ran against Kamau and lost, she feels it's wrong how he's being treated. She added that the South Fulton Mayor was stripped of his ability to vote and perform several other duties.
“They never really gave the mayor that we have now an opportunity because by the time he was elected they immediately started changing the charter so that they could take over, the council has all the power,” Johnson said.
Looking at the numbers, Kamau is just one of several people who have faced the same fate for entering the property at the 6000 Cascade Palmetto Highway in Fairburn. 11Alive reached out to the realtor battling an arrest in court, but they declined to comment.
Residents believe that this issue is beyond the mayor.
“A lot of people feel like, a lot of their rights as a citizen is being taken away from them that the control is actually being taken by the council,” Johnson said.
The mayor also declined to comment at this time.