The living conditions in apartments owned by Sen. Raphael Warnock’s church have been described as deplorable
- Atlanta police and firefighters have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences at MLK Village hundreds of times since 2020
- Responding officers have been met with corpses and people trapped in elevators, as well as fights, burglaries, and car thefts
- Both buildings are owned by the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock serves as senior pastor
- The records could pose problems for Warnock, who is seeking to defeat Republican challenger Herschel Walker amid rising crime
Columbia Tower
- Police have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences over 150 times since January, in response to allegations of larceny, fighting, and criminal trespassing.
- The Fire Department was called to the building 153 times between January 2020 and January 2021, sometimes to rescue people trapped or stranded due to broken elevators.
In 2020, Columbia Residential hired a new maintenance man named Anthony Bernard Stokes, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison two years earlier after serving decades for a 1992 homicide.
- Fulton County prosecutors allege that just months after he started the job, Stokes killed his 56-year-old girlfriend, Sean Macklin, in the apartment they shared at Columbia Senior Residences.
Fire department incident reports for Columbia Tower corroborate accounts of residents who told the Free Beacon in October that they’ve witnessed firefighters hauling their handicapped neighbors to and from their rooms because of the building’s chronically broken elevators.
- Warnock's church, which pays the senator a $7,417 monthly housing allowance, owns Columbia Tower through a network of shell organizations connected to the Ebenezer Building Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity that delegates all management duties to the church and identifies Warnock as its principal officer in its IRS Form 990 filings.
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