It took 15 weeks and an open dispute with city officials for the children of Johnny Hollman to secure the public release of their father’s last moments that were captured on the body camera of the police officer who took the deacon’s life in 2023.
Hollman’s family wanted the public to see the footage to correct the initial narrative about what happened the night he was killed. Hours after Hollman was pronounced dead at Grady Hospital, the Atlanta Police Department released a statement describing the 62-year-old as “agitated and uncooperative” throughout the fatal incident.
The Hollman family’s public struggle for transparency reemerged this year during the 2026 legislative session when Senate Bill 482, a bill to tighten rules around the release of law enforcement mug shots and body camera and dash camera footage, seemed poised to become law.
Racial justice and First Amendment advocates point to the Hollman case as just one reason to oppose the bill. The Georgia First Amendment Foundation criticized SB 482 for its potential to reduce “oversight of police activities, including officer-involved shootings.”
Although public access to mug shots and video footage remains safe for now, since the bill failed to pass in the House on the final day of the legislative session last Thursday, it did gain bipartisan support and was unanimously passed by the state Senate on March 3.
On the evening of Aug. 10, 2023, Hollman was bringing dinner home to his wife after Bible study when he was involved in a minor car accident around the corner from his West End home. He called 911 and waited at the scene for over an hour for Atlanta police to arrive.
When officer Kiran Kimbrough, 23, arrived, according to the report, he determined that Hollman was at fault for the accident and issued a traffic citation, which Hollman initially refused to sign. The officer and Hollman begin an argument that escalated into a physical altercation.
Kimbrough wrestled Hollman to the ground and then used his department issued Taser on him multiple times. Hollman became unresponsive and medical responders’ attempts to revive him were unsuccessful, according to the police report.
Arnitra Hollman, who was on the phone with her father when he died, said the initial police statement was an attempt to blame him for his own death.
“For you to put the narrative out there as if he was drunk, he was combative, he was aggressive, that’s not my dad’s character,” Hollman told Atlanta City Council members at a meeting two months later.
After a lengthy public comment where she and her siblings Myteka Burdett and Johnny Hollman Jr. demanded the body camera footage be released publicly, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution urging Mayor Andre Dickens and APD to release the video. The footage was made public seven weeks later.
Kimbrough was dismissed from the department. Last August, a Fulton County grand jury declined to indict the former officer on manslaughter charges.
According to the bill’s author, Republican state Sen. Brian Strickland, the original purpose of the legislation was to deter websites that earn advertising revenue from publishing mug shots.
“It’s become an entertainment industry,” Strickland told the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee on March 24 before lawmakers voted to advance the bill days later.
“People that are never convicted of a crime, just arrested, or someone that’s convicted of a crime, their image lives forever for entertainment purposes. And that is not the reason we have mug shots in our state.”
After she testified against the bill in front of the House committee, Sarah Hunt-Blackwell, senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Georgia, took to social media to ask voters to ask their representatives to vote against the bill because of the implications for body camera footage..
“By restricting this access, [SB 482] could implicate First Amendment rights and severely hampers government transparency and accountability,” she said.
In defense of his bill, Strickland told the House committee that members of the “legitimate press” who are fighting this bill could end up pushing legislators toward an even more restrictive solution.
“Other states do it that way, where you can’t get any body cam, any mug shots, until a case is completely closed. Is that [the] direction Georgia wants to go? Well, if we don’t get our hands around this, then I think that’s the direction we have to go as a state.”
Last fall, two years after Hollman’s death, his family and JustEldridge Media released What About the Deacon, a short documentary including the body camera footage and interviews with the family to set the record straight about what happened the night their father, grandfather, and uncle was killed.
The documentary is currently streaming for free on YouTube.
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