ATLANTA — A local artist said she was held up at gunpoint inside her Garden Hills apartment in Buckhead. Now she wants to share the mistake she made so it doesn't happen to anyone else.
“What he got was really old and broken, but it is all I had,” Stacy Atwood said.
Atwood posted about the incident on the app Nextdoor.
“I don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” she said.
Atwood said she’s always felt safe in the apartment she’s lived in for 10 years, but that changed Friday night when she left her door unlocked.
“I was sitting here making jewelry for my gallery exhibition,” she said.
Her cat was next to her.
“He looked up at the door and looked back over at me and back at the door,” she said. “I looked and I saw my back door was open.”
She got up to close it.
“I started saying, ‘Hello, hello,’” she said.
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She got to her bathroom door and said the robber was standing there armed with a weapon.
“The robber was standing right here with a gun. He put the gun to my head, grabbed the Taser out of my hand, put me down on the ground right here, all the way down on the floor and asked me, ‘Don’t look at my face or I will shoot you in the head,’” she said.
The robber allegedly dragged her into the living room.
“He said, ‘What do you got? What do you got?’" Atwood said.
She gave him her iPhone, MacBook and iPad.
“He says, ‘Oh, you make jewelry?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I am an artist’ and he said, ‘Well I am sorry, hard times you know,’” she said.
Atwood said she told the man she's living in hard times, too.
“Then he said, ‘Stop crying. I am not going to hurt you,'” she said.
Atwood said the robber told her to sit in a chair and count to 10. He left and took her sense of security with him.
“I never thought that something like this would happen," she said.
Atwood said she put up a fence in the back area of her apartment after the robbery.
Before he left, Atwood said the the man told her something that has now haunted her ever since.
“He said, ‘You better lock your back door. I’ve been watching you for a week,’ and I don’t have a vehicle. I walk everywhere on a regular basis, so I may have walked passed this guy 10 times. And not know it,” she said.
Atwood added more lights around her patio, a place she calls her sanctuary.
Police told Channel 2 Action News they are investigating.