LISTEN: The legal precedent of sovereign immunity could change the way housing authorities in Georgia are held responsible in cases where tenants allege harm. GPB's Sofi Gratas has more.
In his newly furnished apartment in West Macon, Carlos Ross says he remembers his son, Carmelo Ross, as Mello. He jokes that his son wanted to be “Mr. Superstar.”
“He wanted to be a rapper,” Ross said. “He liked to play basketball, pretty much just liked to hang out … He had long dreads. Always twisting his hair, always in the mirror.”
Even as a teenager with lots of friends, Carmelo would call his dad to check in everyday, and make sure he’d taken his medicine.
“Mello made it known that you were going to love him,” Ross said. “Cause he’s going to do something to make you laugh. He’d make you mad too, but he was going to make you laugh.”
It was three days after Carlos Ross’s birthday when Carmelo, then 15 years old, was killed in a drive-by shooting while visiting Anthony Homes on Jan. 19, 2022. Anthony Homes is a public housing complex on Macon’s west side. Carmelo was with some friends when it happened, and one was shot in the hand. The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office has not arrested anyone for the shooting or for Carmelo’s murder.
Ross, along with Carmelo’s mom, sued the Macon Housing Authority over his death a few months later. In the lawsuit, they alleged that despite knowing about criminal activity on the street where Carmelo died, the housing authority had not done enough to keep the apartment complex safe.
Homicides had happened there before. Based on death certificates, along the same street less than a mile from where Carmelo was shot, about one person had been killed every year since 2019. Another young person was killed on Wren Avenue a year after Carmelo.
In response to the lawsuit, the Macon Housing Authority denied that it was aware of previous criminal activity, though it did confirm that there was no security gate or surveillance cameras at the time of Carmelo’s death.
The housing authority denied responsibility by claiming sovereign immunity.
“Meaning that they cannot be sued except in very particular circumstances,” said attorney James Adamoli. “Because they are part of the city government, county government, municipality government, depending on where they are.”
Adamoli represented Carmelo Ross’s parents in court. According to documents filed in the case, the Macon Housing Authority tried to dismiss the lawsuit under sovereign immunity by claiming that, as a government-funded entity, it is protected from lawsuit. The judge denied this, and the case was settled outside of court for an undisclosed amount of money.
Sovereign immunity dates back to British common law and the idea that the king can do no wrong. The updated version of that precedent protects state and federal agencies such as the post office or police departments from some lawsuits today.
"Essentially saying we don't want all of these lawsuits draining the state treasury," Adamoli said.
Only recently have housing authorities, like Macon’s, started asking for the same protection.
Adamoli and other lawyers say if housing authorities are granted that, an already vulnerable group of people who can’t just pick up and move to a better neighborhood would have further limited options for reprieve.
“So when these people get hurt, they're stuck in these housing authorities — they can't necessarily afford to be anywhere else,” Adamoli said. “And then we say, ‘Sorry, the courthouse doors are closed to you.’ That’s a problem.”
In January, the Georgia Supreme Court agreed to take up a case out of Augusta after the housing authority there was granted sovereign immunity by a Court of Appeals judge.
If the state Supreme Court rules in favor of the Augusta Housing Authority, housing authorities statewide could use that defense successfully in cases like Carmelo Ross’s.
In the Augusta case, public housing tenant Christina Guy claims she was shot in the leg in November 2021 during an attempted robbery. Soon after she sued the Augusta Housing Authority for negligence over reported crime and safety issues.
Ultimately, Guy lost her negligence case when the judge ruled that the Augusta Housing Authority should be protected as an instrumentality of the city.
"Sovereign immunity extended to the State and its departments, agencies, and officers in their official capacities," the decision reads. "Likewise, municipalities performing governmental functions have long been afforded the same immunity as that of the State."
And so municipal agencies can have the same protection, he ruled, unless it's waived by state lawmakers.
Guy appealed the appeals court decision.
"Housing authorities changed their strategy," said personal injury attorney, Mike Walker, about the decision to argue for municipal rather than state protection.
In a previous decision made by the appeals court just a year earlier, in Pass v. Athens Housing Authority, a tenant of the Nellie B. public housing complex sued for negligence and premise-liability after being shot at the apartment complex. Again, the housing authority claimed sovereign immunity. In June 2023, the appeals court ruled to reverse a trial court decision, instead siding with Guy.
“What you're dealing with is a situation where you have thousands of low-income tenants across the state of Georgia,” Walker said. “Really the only recourse they have when they're wronged by their landlord, which is in this case the housing authority, is to bring a claim in the court system.”
In fact, enough tenants have sued housing authorities for negligence and wrongful death in Atlanta, Columbus, Augusta and Macon that those cities' housing authorities submitted a letter of support for the Augusta Housing Authority during the appeals process of the Guy case.
The Georgia Supreme Court now has that amicus brief in the materials the court will later consider.
Mike Austin is the housing director in Macon. He says suing housing authorities over crime in public housing is problematic, because the authorities “can never guarantee safety.”
“Unfortunately, crime happens everywhere,” Austin said. “But we can do things and we do do things to help with safety.”
For example, after 15-year-old Carmelo Ross was killed, the Macon Housing Authority put up surveillance cameras around high-risk neighborhoods and arranged for extra officers to patrol those neighborhoods at night.
But since then, the trend of a homicide a year on the street where Carmelo died has ended.
Austin said there are also rules the housing authority expects that tenants follow, such as keeping out guests who engage in criminal activity, and not letting young children roam around without adult supervision.
"Housing authorities, most of them that I know, want to do a great job ... and they really do care about their residents and about the quality of the housing," Austin said.
But safety costs money, which Austin says housing authorities don’t have a lot of. Plus, there is a public housing shortage. Hundreds of people are on waitlists for apartments.
“If you're going to be an affordable housing operator, you've got to be very, very disciplined because you have a finite amount of rent revenue that you've got to deal with,” Austin said. “But there's no cap on expenses.”
The appeals court decision granting housing authorities sovereign immunity argued their budgets should be protected from expensive liability lawsuits because they perform an essential government function.
Austin and others argue that mission gets thwarted with an increase in lawsuits, which also results in higher insurance premiums.
“Housing authorities have become an instrumentality of their local jurisdictions, whether it be a county or city,” Austin said. “And so our job is to provide affordable housing for the citizens of Macon-Bibb. … The housing authority can't just turn around and say, 'well, gosh, I'll just raise my rents.'”
But Walker argues that by giving housing authorities this power to protect themselves from litigation, it’s not just victims of violent crime that could be kept from seeking damages.
“It's my belief that the housing authorities are raising this argument in all cases,” Walker said. "It's not just shooting cases. The doctrine of sovereign immunity as an entity is being just immune from suit. You can't sue them."
That would include cases that deal with hazardous conditions inside apartments, such as mold or lead pipes.
The state Supreme Court will make its own decision. Seperately, under Gov. Brian Kemp, state lawmakers are expected to push for more protections against expensive premise liability lawsuits under the governor's massive proposal for tort reform.
Meanwhile, Walker and other attorneys have been told by judges that they have to wait for the state Supreme Court to issue a decision on sovereign immunity before ongoing lawsuits against housing authorities can move forward. Some cases are years into arguments.
“Every day that a case gets delayed, as a plaintiff's lawyer, that's usually worse for the plaintiff,” Adamoli said. “Because that means that more and more files will disappear or the data gets degraded.”
And that makes it harder to win any sort of reprieve.
Inside a courtroom last fall, parents Arthur Anthony and Teausha Tanskley joined the list of people with hurt or dead family members waiting for a decision on their cases. Anthony sued the Augusta Housing Authority in 2023 over the death of their 8-year-old daughter Arbrie on Jan. 8, 2022.
Arbrie, like 15-year-old Carmelo Ross, was shot in a random act of violence while playing outside at Dogwood Terrace, the same apartment complex at the center of the case now headed to the Georgia Supreme Court.
Later, a group of gang members would be arrested for Arbrie’s murder, though there have been delays in that conviction.
In a similar format to others, Anthony's lawsuit alleges the Augusta Housing Authority was aware of previous crimes committed on the premises, including shootings, and did not provide enough security, “thereby creating an unreasonable risk of injury.”
Soon after being sued, the housing authority moved to dismiss the case and claimed sovereign immunity. During the last hearing for the case in October, the judge said she could not issue a ruling until something came down from the Georgia Supreme Court.
“You could tell that she was going to be something special,” said Arbrie’s aunt, Jamilla McDaniel, speaking of Arbrie in place of her brother, Arbrie’s dad.
McDaniel was there that day — she said she had just left the complex before the shooting. As a former resident, McDaniel’s experience is that violence has always been a problem at Dogwood Terrace.
“I saw a couple of people get killed before right in front of me,” McDaniel said. “It was all random.”
Once the city installed security cameras at the complex, McDaniel said things felt safer. But a few year later, Arbrie was killed.
McDaniel said she blames the housing authority for what happened.
“They didn't take the proper precautions like they were supposed to,” she said.
McDaniel would like to see security gates at the entrance of a neighborhood like Dogwood Terrace, where families live.
But now, the city is tearing the apartment complex down. All its residents are being relocated.
The Augusta Housing Authority says it’s because the apartments were out of code — they were built without air conditioning, for example — and that they plan to build something new that will fit more people. Housing director Douglas Freeman said the city decided "that we didn't want to continue to sink money into modernizing and maintaining what's obviously obsolete property."
Freeman said the Augusta Housing Authority relies on partnerships with local law enforcement to patrol the area.
"You can see the public streets; anybody can drive through," Freeman said. "So people come in. There are acts that are committed, and then they leave."
Back in Macon, Carlos Ross was able to move his family from the house they used to live in, down the street from where his son was shot, with the money he won in their settlement agreement.
“It doesn’t excite me,” Ross said of the money. "I never had that much ever in my life, but it doesn't excite me. I’d rather have him back.”
Ross says for the sake of Carmelo’s siblings and his son’s friends, he hopes the city of Macon does more to stem violence in the places they live.
GPB reporter Grant Blankenship contributed reporting for this story.
