30 Years in the Making—Justice at Last for Slain Officer

In the early hours of 3 November 1971, a young Atlanta police officer by the name of Jimmy Greene was ambushed and killed as he sat in his patrol wagon eating his late-night supper. On 13 October 2003—some 32 years later—the man responsible was found guilty of his murder in Fulton County Superior Court.

Freddie Hilton (51) was convicted of murder in the long-ago death of Jimmy Greene in a case prosecuted by Deputy District Attorney Al Dixon, Senior Assistant District Attorney Michele McCutcheon, and Senior Assistant District Attorney Peggy Katz. Atlanta Police Detective Jimmy Rose and Senior Investigator M.C. Cox of the District Attorney’s Office investigated the case. Judge Stephanie Manis will sentence Hilton on 10 November, and he faces a possible double life sentence in prison.

At the time of the murder, Hilton was a member of an organization known as the "Black Liberation Army," a militant group infamous for attacks on law enforcement officers in New York City and across the country. A handful of the group’s members had come to Atlanta after breaking away from the Black Panther Party in the early 1970s. Hilton was among these.

Officer Greene, engaged to be married and the father of one infant daughter, was sitting in his vehicle at a gas station at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Boulevard when he was approached by Hilton and his now-dead co-conspirator Twyman Meyers. Hilton shot Officer Greene three times at close range, stole his revolver and badge, and fled the scene. A witness saw Greene slumped over in the front seat and soon realized he had been shot. Greene died two hours later.

Several other former BLA members testified at the trial that Hilton and Meyers returned to the group’s residence where the pair bragged of the killing.

Shortly after the incident, Atlanta police found a witness who said he heard Hilton confess to the killing, but then-District Attorney Lewis Slaton felt there was not enough evidence to bring formal charges. So the story ended there…or so it seemed.

In early 2001, Detective Rose received a call from New York City Police Detective Chris Karolkowski who had come across Hilton as a suspect in a child molestation case and soon discovered that he had been the prime suspect in Greene’s murder. Rose soon re-opened the case, and, with the help of Investigator Cox, a Grand Jury indicted Hilton for the murder in July of last year. (Incidentally, Rose and Cox received the National Association of Police Organizations’ highest honor last year for their work on the case.) Hilton, who had changed his name to Kamau Sadiki and was now working in telecommunications in New York, was brought back to Atlanta to face trial.

Aside from justice for Officer Greene, perhaps the most positive aspect of this painful incident was the re-uniting of Greene’s long-estranged daughter Melody Adams (now 34) of North Carolina with aunts and uncles she had never known. Hearing about the trial in the news, Adams traveled to Atlanta to sit in on the trial and soon revealed her identity to other family members in attendance. A family long-separated by a brutal crime was now re-united.