August 15, 2025 • 31 mins
A 19-year-old chasing a modeling dream in Atlanta is found at dawn in Oakland City Park—shot with specialty ammo and left to send a message. We trace her final hours from a Memorial Drive Shell station to a car abandoned near Stone Mountain, and unpack the larger system around her: LA-origin crews embedded in Atlanta’s nightlife, the blurred lines between “security” and control, and why leaving can be treated like treason. Featuring timeline breakdowns, forensics (the Sprite bottle DNA), and voices from advocates and family. Say her name. See the pattern.
Content note: violence, exploitation.Resources for help and exit support are listed in the show notes.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
No tears for black girls when they disappear, No tears for
black girls like they were neverhere, but we remember will speak
their names. Oakland City.
Park was quiet except for the dogs.
(00:22):
Just after sunrise on May 31st, 2016.
A jogger waved off. Stray mutts circling something
in the wet. Grass the.
Ground was still slick from a light dawn drizzle, the kind
that makes. Every leaf, whisper the jogger.
Slowed, squinted, then froze in the dew.
There was skin pale. Exposed.
(00:45):
Out of place. In a City Park meant for morning
Tai chi and stroller walks. No clothes, no bag, no phone.
The. Dogs had found her first.
Someone had meant for others to find her next.
The wounds told their own story before the city knew her name.
Shots driven downward into a body already prone.
A finishing posture. Execution, Not argument.
(01:09):
Not a robbery gone bad, not a panic.
It was message work, the kind that says.
If you talk. If you run, if you make the
wrong person look weak, you end up here in the open for everyone
to see. Her name was Bridget Shield, 19.
(01:29):
A bright. Quick talking DC girl raised by
her grandparents Jim and. Beverly Tull, She laughed with
her whole face. Dramatic in the right ways.
The kind who would fling open the blinds and say.
Look at the day. In Atlanta, she was chasing a
modeling dream in a city where dreams wear makeup and a ring
light. There were photo.
(01:50):
Sets, makeup, chairs. Instagram shots in good.
Light there were also. Questions about how she paid
rent, who drove her at night, who answered the phones because
Google told a different story. The one families.
Dread Backpage. Listings under names like Nastia
and Spice. Rotations and aliases.
(02:11):
The kind of listings that mean you're being moved.
Tracked. Watched.
That someone else's hands are onthe wheel, Friends whispered
She'd gotten close to an older boyfriend, Kevin.
Police reports traced the friction in one, she called 911
and said he punched her in another.
Days later, Bridget was. Fighting with Kevin's child's
(02:31):
mother, Brittany. Alaka, while all three.
Shared the same unforgiving space.
Somewhere in that pressure cooker, a friend says, Bridget
confided she might be pregnant. She was.
Scared to even say. It out loud fear.
Is a character in this story. It sits in the corner of rooms,
(02:52):
rides in the back seat, keeps the volume low on voices that
were loud just a month ago. The final day of her life.
Unwinds in traceable beats. Early evening, she's on
Snapchat. Playful near where her.
Body will be found hours. Later.
Too pretty to walk in the grass.She says.
Camera. Tilted, a little flirty, a
(03:14):
little bored. She calls a friend and sounds
fine. Plans are vague.
The kind of night that could be nothing or everything.
A little after 11 PMA Shell station on Memorial Drive in De
Kalb County. Fluorescent lights, a late night
quiet punctured by bass from passing cars.
Surveillance captures a Redford Fusion pulling up.
(03:38):
It's Bridget's car, but Bridget is in the passenger seat.
Two men are with her, a witness.Later says she looked.
Extremely nervous. Not tipsy, not annoyed.
Nervous. Like she knew this was about to
turn into something she couldn't.
Stop hours later, gunshots. Crack the morning near Oakland
(03:58):
City Park. A neighbor ducks, dials 911
peers through blinds. The calls get logged.
Uniforms route to the wrong edgeof the park.
Dawn slides forward anyway. The jogger finds her at autopsy.
The science makes the message unmistakable.
Multiple shots, some fired from above into a body already down,
(04:22):
and the ammunition RIP rounds radically invasive.
Projectiles. Not cheap, not common, not
thrown into the cart by accident.
These are engineered to flower and fragment inside a.
Body to. Break and shred to turn organs
into debris. You buy them to make sure pain
(04:42):
becomes a rumor that spreads. Detectives move in.
Circles first the. Scene then the orbit Oakland
City Park yields little more than shell casings and silence.
They follow the car. The next day, Bridget's Redford
Fusion is found abandoned near Stone Mountain, 20 miles from
(05:03):
the park and not far from that shell inside.
Is a Sprite. Bottle and some of Bridget's
clothing. The bottle looks like.
Clutter. It isn't.
It's a time capsule. While they wait for the.
Lab detectives interview. They speak to Kevin.
He is defensive in all the ways men get when grief and guilt are
(05:23):
both in the room and the camerasare on.
In a recorded sit down months later, he swings between
tenderness and theater. He says Bridget meant a lot to
me. He insists he's been cleared.
He denies the hits. He denies gangs.
He offers an odd theory. Maybe Bridget rejected.
(05:43):
Someone used her aggressive mouth and paid.
For it. It sounds like justification
dressed up as speculation. Beverly, Bridget's grandmother,
hears the wind up and sees right.
Through it, she has always believed.
Bridget didn't. Choose the escort life.
Someone older ushered her in andkept her there.
(06:05):
She had a. Lot of growing up to.
Do, Beverly would say. She should have been given the
chance between interviews and vigils.
The family does what families doin this kind of limbo.
Call the detective. Clip the news Pray for a lead
that doesn't come with another body.
Attached. Then the lab calls.
Back. The Sprite bottle matters.
(06:26):
There's DNA on the rim. It hits a name that makes
homicide detectives in metro Atlanta.
Sit up straighter. Because they've seen it before,
and not just once. Christopher Crisco.
Spencer Spencer is not rumor. He is a filing cabinet full.
Of grief. In October 2016, five months
(06:47):
after Bridget was. Killed.
An elderly Stone Mountain couple, Sylvia Watson and
Samuel. White were executed.
In their apartment, prosecutors called it senseless.
Judges called it cold. Spencer went down for it.
In another case, a home invasionon Libby Lane in Clayton County.
Spencer and a crew of rolling 20s Crips stormed a house
(07:10):
looking for a rival. The rival didn't live there.
The family that did, 2 parents, four children became targets.
Anyway, 11 year old Tatiana and her 14 year old brother Davion
were shot and killed. In 2023, Spencer and Co
defendant Devin Dunson were sentenced to two consecutive
(07:31):
life terms without parole plus 20 years.
The Georgia. Supreme Court has upheld his
convictions in other. Cases he will.
Die in prison if nothing changes.
He is the kind of man other men call when they want someone.
Erased the. DNA puts him in Bridget's car,
his mouth on a bottle someone left behind in a hurry or in
(07:52):
arrogance. Detectives.
Charge him with malice murder, Felony murder aggravated.
Assault with a deadly. Weapon and a firearm during the
Commission of a felony. In Bridget's case, they don't
fill in the rest, not. Publicly, who were the?
Two men at the shell was one of them Spencer?
Was the other a? Lieutenant, how did Spencer's
(08:15):
orbit and Bridget's overlap? Escort OPS a debt.
A warning, A punishment? Did someone order this and if?
So what was? The price of disobedience Here
is what we think happened and why.
We believe Bridget was killed because she.
Was trying to leave the operation.
(08:35):
Not a hunch, a pattern. Start with her words.
And behavior in the days. Before she died.
Friends say Bridget confided shemight be pregnant and was scared
to tell the man controlling her.Life that fear.
Tracks with a known flashpoint in trafficking dynamics.
Pregnancy shifts. Power.
(08:56):
It can slow movement, complicatebookings and trigger violent
discipline. If a girl talks.
About stepping away. The fear also.
Shows up in her calls. Short, clipped conversations.
Abruptly ended when certain names came up.
That is exit energy behavior. A young woman working an escape
plan while trying not to make noise.
(09:18):
Look at the movements that night.
She's in her own car, but she's not driving.
Two men are with her at the memorial.
Dr. Shell, a witness, says she looked extremely nervous when a
victim is seated passenger side in her own vehicle with
handlers. That's transport, not a date.
It suggests she wasn't moving freely and it aligns with a
(09:40):
common pre exit scenario. The crew intercepts her under
the cover of a ride. A gig or a talk?
You don't bring two men to a friendly conversation, you bring
two men to control outcomes. Consider the car dump near Stone
Mountain. Close to where?
Christopher Crisco. Spencer operated.
That's not where you leave a vehicle when a date goes wrong
(10:02):
by accident. That's where you leave.
A vehicle when you want it recovered in your footprint.
Because fear of a. Witness is gone once the
message. Is delivered it also.
Tells you the decision makers were comfortable on that turf.
She wasn't. The Sprite bottle with.
Spencer's DNA is more than a labresult.
It's a snapshot of power dynamics.
(10:23):
He wasn't anxious. He was calm enough to drink.
Leave. Saliva and walk away.
Girls trying to run don't. Pause to sip soda.
Men staging a lesson due his presence in her car on the last
night of her life collapses a dozen theories and elevates 1
enforcement. The ammunition choice RIP rounds
(10:46):
fits that enforcement logic. They're expensive, uncommon, and
communicate intent. This is not a robbery, this is a
sanction. Combine that with her being shot
from above while prone and the public staging nude in a family
park at dawn and the. Choreography reads like policy.
Not impulse in trafficking and gang enforcement.
(11:09):
Public degradation is a tactic. It erases dignity and broadcast
control to anyone else thinking of leaving.
Her digital. Footprint strengthens the.
Exit hypothesis. The Backpage aliases.
Nastia Spice. Show a controlled rotation.
When a girl is actively making money for a crew, she's an
(11:31):
asset. When she signals she's done, she
becomes liability and knowledge.A 19 year old who knows phones,
routes, faces and safe apartments and is scared enough
to whisper she's pregnant is someone a crew might decide to.
Neutralize rather. Than risk defection or
disclosure. Add the domestic volatility.
(11:51):
Bridget reported being hit, thengot into a fight with her
boyfriend's child's mother, all while sharing a cramped home.
That's a pressure cooker. Exits often begin with domestic
flashpoints, arguments that pusha victim to say I'm done.
To pack a bag to reach. Out to a friend her playful
Snapchat too pretty to walk in the grass posted near where she
(12:15):
would be found can read like denial or defiance in the early
hours of a plan to. Bolt by the shell.
Station that defiance. Looks replaced by fear.
And then there's the silence from the men at the Shell.
Detectives have never named thempublicly.
No one has claimed they were just giving her a ride.
(12:36):
If this were consensual movementthat turned random, someone
talks in controlled exits. No one talks because the outcome
was the point. Thread these clues together.
The pregnancy fear, the clipped calls, the handlers in her car,
the Spencer DNA, the specialty rounds, the public degradation,
(12:57):
the Stone Mountain dump. And you don't get a lover's
quarrel or a random predator. You get enforcement for
disobedience, the textbook consequence for a girl trying to
leave a money machine she didn'tcontrol.
To understand the why beyond onenight, you need to understand
Atlanta in that moment and the currents underneath its skyline
(13:17):
glow. By the mid 2000s teens, Atlanta
had become the. Hollywood of the South.
Sound stages, Music video budgets.
Nightclub residencies, Festival money for young women.
The city's promise was intoxicating.
Modeling gigs, Brand ambassador,work club hosting the fantasy
(13:39):
that one good photo shoot could turn into a career.
But the same promise created hunting grounds, the sex
economy. Here is a sophisticated.
Machine IT recruits from Instagram DMS, club bathrooms,
modeling agencies. With glossy websites.
And no licensing. It advertises on platforms like
(14:00):
Backpage, then and Now, on encrypted channels and
alternative. Sites rotating.
Names and faces, changing numbers, moving the product,
where the money goes. Conventions.
Sports weekends. Music festivals.
Now the part Atlanta. Rarely says out loud.
The Los Angeles pipeline and howit.
Took root here beginning. In the 1990s and accelerating
(14:24):
through the 2000s, documented members and affiliates of major
Los Angeles sets, Rolling 60s, Neighborhood Crips, 8 Tray,
Gangster Crips, Hoover Criminals, and subsets like the
Rolling 20s migrated or were sent to the Southeast.
Some came chasing music, money, and cheaper cost of living.
Some were transplants through family relocation, parole moves
(14:48):
or expansion assignments. Atlanta's position as a
transportation hub and later a film and music capital made it
ideal ground rolling 60s neighborhood.
Crips established a real. Footprint in metro Atlanta by
the late 2000s, particularly in DeKalb in the South Side.
Blending St. level trafficking with party promotion and club.
(15:10):
Security. Their model emphasized
structure, tiers, protocols. Designated earners and enforcers
investigations in the 2000 tens tied rolling 60 sets to guns,
narcotics, fraud and enforcementaround the sex economy when it
intersected with profit streams.8 Trey Gangster Crips imported.
(15:35):
The volatility that. Defined the LA.
Turf war era. Home invasions robberies fast
retaliation in Atlanta 8 tray Gangster Crips activity surfaced
in robbery crews and Interstate fraud rings with cross
pollination into escort protection and discipline when
artists and models overlapped with money movers Hoover
(15:59):
criminals various Hoover sets known for smash and.
Grab Burglary. Rings and taxing strategies in
LA. Hoover affiliated crews.
In the A linked to high speed. Theft crews.
Gun pipelines and selective control over dancers and escorts
tied to certain clubs and promoters.
(16:19):
Rolling 20's the set most visibly linked to the Spencer
cases in Georgia court. Records.
In metro Atlanta and adjacent counties, rolling 20s function
like mobile strike. Squads tasked crews that could
pivot. From a targeted robbery to a
punitive hit, their work bled into the sex economy in the same
way it has on the West Coast as security, transport, debt
(16:43):
collection and punishment for perceived disobedience.
Why Atlanta? Three reasons.
Law enforcement and academics. Site Mobility.
I20I-75. I-80.
Five and the. World's busiest airport.
Money, music, film boom, convention and sports tourism
(17:03):
and cover dense suburbs, extended stay hotels and a
nightlife ecosystem where VIP lists, hostings and modeling
blur into booking systems. By the early to mid 2000, tens
joint operations between APD DeKalb.
GB IFB. I and HSI repeatedly identified
(17:24):
LA origin sets embedded in MetroCruise, sometimes collaborating
with local bloods and hybrid cliques, sometimes running
parallel tracks. The result wasn't cosplay, it
was a merger. West Coast discipline stitched
onto Southern Opportunity. Once those systems rooted
enforcement looked familiar to anyone who studied LA in the 80s
(17:46):
and 90s. Highly performative violence
designed to travel by word of mouth.
Specialty ammo public staging bodies left in highly.
Visible places cars. Move to set heavy zones like
Stone Mountain and South. DeKalb.
Where crews felt insulated and in the overlapping sex economy,
(18:07):
the rules. Mirrored the coast the.
Phone and the aliases belong to the set.
Security is a euphemism for control.
Leaving is treated as. Theft or.
Treason in that world. Certain.
Details become code RIP. Ammunition means expense, intent
and a desire to leave a calling card.
(18:28):
Nudity at a dump site is not sexual, it is humiliation.
A public. Park at dawn is not clumsy.
It is choreography an. Abandoned car near Stone
Mountain where a known shooter hunts is not random.
It is geography. And there is another geography,
the map of a city at war with exploitation.
(18:50):
Federal and state task forces call metro Atlanta a high
intensity corridor for human trafficking.
Hartsfield. Jackson International moves more
people than any airport in the world.
Conventions, sports and entertainment weekends flood
hotels with anonymous traffic and cash.
Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI's Metro
(19:11):
Atlanta Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force,
GBI's HEAT unit and local department stage periodic
stings. They recover minors.
They arrest buyers, facilitators.
Pimps The Georgia legislature has stiffened penalties.
Created vacateur pathways for survivors.
(19:31):
Funded victim services and pushed awareness into schools
and hotels. And yet.
Advocates will tell you the. Pipeline is still fed by the
same sources. Kids aging out of foster care,
Runaways, couch surfers, those fleeing domestic violence and
those drawn by the city's promise.
With no money to float the month, the entertainment mirage
(19:55):
lures the street eats when exported.
Sets. Graphed onto that pipeline, the
violence looks a certain way. Quick, organized, punishing and
meant to ripple rolling 60s in Atlanta.
Built tears cruise with. Assignments. 8 tray brought
volatility. Robberies.
Home invasions. Retaliation.
(20:16):
Hits Hoover Set Specialized. In smash and grab and
enforcement that bled into sex economy control when it paid the
rolling 20s tied to Spencer in multiple cases moved like a
mobile strike team tasked armed in and out.
Inside those economies, information is currency.
(20:38):
A 19 year old who knows roots, phones, photos and names and
wants out becomes a cost center.Bridget's family has lived
inside that math ever since. Beverly.
Still sets a place for memory. She talks about Bridget.
Like the girl is in the next room.
How she would get ready to slowly.
How she'd. Leave a mess.
(20:59):
How bright her laugh used to be at breakfast.
Jim remembers her stubborn streak and the way she softened
when she felt. Safe.
The house is quieter now, but the silence is not peace.
It is weight, the weight of whatifs, the weight of A.
Justice that names a killer, butnot a reason.
(21:20):
Reporters. Call when there's movement in
the other cases when Spencer loses another appeal when a Co
defendant gets sentenced. When a judge reads a stack of.
Victim statements into the record each time Beverly feels
the strange. Duality.
Relief that a dangerous man is locked forever.
Frustration that Bridget is still a footnote in a broader
(21:42):
biography of violence. The investigation in Bridget's
case has leaned more on forensics than on eyewitness
recollection. The Sprite bottle, the car.
The Shell station footage, the casings.
There's no public evidence that Kevin was charged in her murder.
His denials stand. Brittany has declined comment.
(22:04):
The two men at the shell remain unnamed.
Detectives keep certain threads close because they must, because
sometimes cases flatten when they're too.
Public because a trial. That never comes is a secret
that never speaks. Even with those gaps, the
outline is clear enough to sliceskin.
Bridget lived under pressure with an older boyfriend.
(22:26):
She reported violence. She feared a pregnancy.
She appeared in escort listings with aliases.
She was seen distressed in her own car with two men.
Her car was dumped near Stone Mountain.
A known killer's DNA is on a bottle inside it.
She was. Executed with specialty.
Ammunition and left naked in a park designed for families.
(22:50):
There are chilling subplots, too, accounts that Bridget had
enemies she didn't name, that phones were taken, that a
promise of a gig. Was the bait.
Friends say she became jumpier, scanning rooms, answering, then
hanging up fast, cutting calls short when certain names were
spoken. She told one friend she feared
(23:10):
she was in trouble. The friend thought she meant
money. The friend thinks differently
now to. Tell the story right?
You also have to tell the story.Of a city that monetized out of
town dreams and out of town muscle.
You cannot sell Atlanta as the place where anything can happen
without asking who profits when anything is allowed to happen.
(23:33):
You cannot shoot a music video on Memorial Drive and ignore the
gas station lights that. Hosted the last Clear.
Footage of a teenager who wantedto be seen for her beauty, not
her autopsy. Scars.
There are other voices here too.Advocates who sit in hospital
waiting rooms and talk. Survivors through the paperwork.
Detectives who go home with the smell of cut grass and gunpowder
(23:56):
in their. Clothes prosecutors.
Who pin timelines to courtroom walls and stare at the spaces
where motives should be. Mothers who warned daughters
that Adm from a photographer. Is usually a flyer.
For a nightmare, fathers who learned too late that their
pride in a daughter's hustle blinded them to the hands that
guided it. And there is a simple, ugly
(24:18):
business rule underneath everything in this economy,
silence is enforced. If you speak, if you leave.
If you embarrass the wrong person, someone sends a message.
RIP rounds a public. Park a body.
Stripped of dignity but not of worth, Bridget had worth beyond
(24:40):
measure. So what remains?
Almost a decade. Later.
Open questions that matter. Was Bridget targeted because she
tried to? Leave an operation because she
owed money. Because she carried a secret or
a child. Were the two men at the shell
acting on orders or improvising violence in a car that wasn't
(25:02):
theirs? Did the person who chose the
ammunition also choose the location?
Or was that? Decision made in panic after a
plan went sideways. How many other names sit in
case? Files where the.
Pattern looks like this escort listings, a gas station, a dump
site, and the only difference isthe zip code detectives may know
(25:25):
more than they can. Say prosecutors.
May be holding motive threads for a courtroom that may never
be convened because the man at the center.
Is already buried alive by. Stacked sentences, sometimes
justice. Is a locked door.
Without an explanation, sometimes the truth is trapped
in the mouth of a witness. Too scared to speak?
(25:46):
For Beverly and Jim, that silence is its own cruelty.
For Atlanta, the lesson is not abstract.
You cannot map the city's boom without mapping the economies
that shadow it. You cannot celebrate the
entertainment machine and pretend not to hear its gears
grind up the vulnerable. You cannot remember Bridget only
at the end of her life. You must remember the beginning,
(26:09):
the girl who wanted cameras and sunlight, who believed in her
face and her future. Who moved to a city?
To be seen, and was finally seenonly as evidence.
If you are listening to this in your car on your way to a shoot,
or in your room packing to move to Atlanta for a dream, write
this into your plan. Insist on contracts on daylight
(26:31):
meetings, on bringing someone with you, on controlling your
phone, on not letting anyone hold your IDs, on choosing rides
you can end if a message in yourgut says turn around.
Treat that like gospel. And if you're already inside and
want out, there are numbers to call and people who will meet
you where you are, advocates whodon't need your story to be.
(26:54):
Pretty to fight for you. Bridget should have been given
the chance to grow up. She wasn't.
The least we can do is say her name, trace the pattern, and cut
it where we can by telling the truth out loud, even when the
people who enforce silence are still listening.
If you. Like this episode and our
podcast? Be sure to share on social
media. Leave a 5 star.
(27:16):
Rating and positive review. Up next is the song Headlines
from the soundtrack for novel The Price of Silence.
A No. Tears for black girls.
Story written by. Our show's creator, JC Reedberg.
The Price of Silence is available now on Amazon and for
a free download on Amazon Kindle.
(27:36):
Stay loved, stay blessed. And stay safe.
This is Samantha Paul. For every queen whose story
never made the headlines, this is your anthem, your testimony.
(28:10):
The stone So this crowd up, riseup, speed up.
Now we ain't asking for permission and we call. 35 And
brilliant dreams cut through thewindshield.
Another birthday stolen, Anothertruth concealed.
(28:33):
Where's the breaking news? When black Queens disappear, My
city knows your name, even if cameras weren't there.
When I report my truth, Why is the system so quiet?
When we scream for justice, why they try to deny it?
My melanin magnificent. My power undeniable.
My story we're telling. My life irreplaceable.
Can you feel that? Thunder Sisters rising up.
(28:57):
Breaking. Through the silence, say.
It's time and love, don't tell astory.
Don't tell it right. Glory the fight to survive.
In a. World that tries to minimize.
Not anymore. 1 Queens vanished, but who's
(29:27):
counting beside us? Brown skin missing, system
dismissing. That's the crisis.
Give white victims prime time while our faces just flash.
We're more than your crime scene, more than a broadcast
from Vine City to Decatur, we'recreating our haven mothers
organizing searches when the system's misbehaving.
My billboard should bear the names and lights so bright.
Justice delayed ain't justice. We fighting day and night.
(29:48):
So powerful. Deliver Can you hear them
calling? We hear you calling.
Drink concrete and steal you. The voices of my.
Sister too powerful to conceal There's a new birther.
Rallies at 5 points. Between the city streets, a
revolution. Spirit and a glory, the fight to
(30:15):
survive. In a.
World that tries to minimize anymore.
For every sister lost but never forgotten, Every story untold
(30:39):
but still unfolding. We don't just survive, we
thrive. We don't just remember, we rise.
My name is worth remembering, mystory deserves Tavern, my life
is worth fighting for, and my legacy just begin.
No tears for black girls when they disappear, No tears for
black girls like they were neverhere, but we remember will speak
their names. Oakland City.
Park was quiet except for the dogs.
(00:22):
Just after sunrise on May 31st, 2016.
A jogger waved off. Stray mutts circling something
in the wet. Grass the.
Ground was still slick from a light dawn drizzle, the kind
that makes. Every leaf, whisper the jogger.
Slowed, squinted, then froze in the dew.
There was skin pale. Exposed.
(00:45):
Out of place. In a City Park meant for morning
Tai chi and stroller walks. No clothes, no bag, no phone.
The. Dogs had found her first.
Someone had meant for others to find her next.
The wounds told their own story before the city knew her name.
Shots driven downward into a body already prone.
A finishing posture. Execution, Not argument.
(01:09):
Not a robbery gone bad, not a panic.
It was message work, the kind that says.
If you talk. If you run, if you make the
wrong person look weak, you end up here in the open for everyone
to see. Her name was Bridget Shield, 19.
(01:29):
A bright. Quick talking DC girl raised by
her grandparents Jim and. Beverly Tull, She laughed with
her whole face. Dramatic in the right ways.
The kind who would fling open the blinds and say.
Look at the day. In Atlanta, she was chasing a
modeling dream in a city where dreams wear makeup and a ring
light. There were photo.
(01:50):
Sets, makeup, chairs. Instagram shots in good.
Light there were also. Questions about how she paid
rent, who drove her at night, who answered the phones because
Google told a different story. The one families.
Dread Backpage. Listings under names like Nastia
and Spice. Rotations and aliases.
(02:11):
The kind of listings that mean you're being moved.
Tracked. Watched.
That someone else's hands are onthe wheel, Friends whispered
She'd gotten close to an older boyfriend, Kevin.
Police reports traced the friction in one, she called 911
and said he punched her in another.
Days later, Bridget was. Fighting with Kevin's child's
(02:31):
mother, Brittany. Alaka, while all three.
Shared the same unforgiving space.
Somewhere in that pressure cooker, a friend says, Bridget
confided she might be pregnant. She was.
Scared to even say. It out loud fear.
Is a character in this story. It sits in the corner of rooms,
(02:52):
rides in the back seat, keeps the volume low on voices that
were loud just a month ago. The final day of her life.
Unwinds in traceable beats. Early evening, she's on
Snapchat. Playful near where her.
Body will be found hours. Later.
Too pretty to walk in the grass.She says.
Camera. Tilted, a little flirty, a
(03:14):
little bored. She calls a friend and sounds
fine. Plans are vague.
The kind of night that could be nothing or everything.
A little after 11 PMA Shell station on Memorial Drive in De
Kalb County. Fluorescent lights, a late night
quiet punctured by bass from passing cars.
Surveillance captures a Redford Fusion pulling up.
(03:38):
It's Bridget's car, but Bridget is in the passenger seat.
Two men are with her, a witness.Later says she looked.
Extremely nervous. Not tipsy, not annoyed.
Nervous. Like she knew this was about to
turn into something she couldn't.
Stop hours later, gunshots. Crack the morning near Oakland
(03:58):
City Park. A neighbor ducks, dials 911
peers through blinds. The calls get logged.
Uniforms route to the wrong edgeof the park.
Dawn slides forward anyway. The jogger finds her at autopsy.
The science makes the message unmistakable.
Multiple shots, some fired from above into a body already down,
(04:22):
and the ammunition RIP rounds radically invasive.
Projectiles. Not cheap, not common, not
thrown into the cart by accident.
These are engineered to flower and fragment inside a.
Body to. Break and shred to turn organs
into debris. You buy them to make sure pain
(04:42):
becomes a rumor that spreads. Detectives move in.
Circles first the. Scene then the orbit Oakland
City Park yields little more than shell casings and silence.
They follow the car. The next day, Bridget's Redford
Fusion is found abandoned near Stone Mountain, 20 miles from
(05:03):
the park and not far from that shell inside.
Is a Sprite. Bottle and some of Bridget's
clothing. The bottle looks like.
Clutter. It isn't.
It's a time capsule. While they wait for the.
Lab detectives interview. They speak to Kevin.
He is defensive in all the ways men get when grief and guilt are
(05:23):
both in the room and the camerasare on.
In a recorded sit down months later, he swings between
tenderness and theater. He says Bridget meant a lot to
me. He insists he's been cleared.
He denies the hits. He denies gangs.
He offers an odd theory. Maybe Bridget rejected.
(05:43):
Someone used her aggressive mouth and paid.
For it. It sounds like justification
dressed up as speculation. Beverly, Bridget's grandmother,
hears the wind up and sees right.
Through it, she has always believed.
Bridget didn't. Choose the escort life.
Someone older ushered her in andkept her there.
(06:05):
She had a. Lot of growing up to.
Do, Beverly would say. She should have been given the
chance between interviews and vigils.
The family does what families doin this kind of limbo.
Call the detective. Clip the news Pray for a lead
that doesn't come with another body.
Attached. Then the lab calls.
Back. The Sprite bottle matters.
(06:26):
There's DNA on the rim. It hits a name that makes
homicide detectives in metro Atlanta.
Sit up straighter. Because they've seen it before,
and not just once. Christopher Crisco.
Spencer Spencer is not rumor. He is a filing cabinet full.
Of grief. In October 2016, five months
(06:47):
after Bridget was. Killed.
An elderly Stone Mountain couple, Sylvia Watson and
Samuel. White were executed.
In their apartment, prosecutors called it senseless.
Judges called it cold. Spencer went down for it.
In another case, a home invasionon Libby Lane in Clayton County.
Spencer and a crew of rolling 20s Crips stormed a house
(07:10):
looking for a rival. The rival didn't live there.
The family that did, 2 parents, four children became targets.
Anyway, 11 year old Tatiana and her 14 year old brother Davion
were shot and killed. In 2023, Spencer and Co
defendant Devin Dunson were sentenced to two consecutive
(07:31):
life terms without parole plus 20 years.
The Georgia. Supreme Court has upheld his
convictions in other. Cases he will.
Die in prison if nothing changes.
He is the kind of man other men call when they want someone.
Erased the. DNA puts him in Bridget's car,
his mouth on a bottle someone left behind in a hurry or in
(07:52):
arrogance. Detectives.
Charge him with malice murder, Felony murder aggravated.
Assault with a deadly. Weapon and a firearm during the
Commission of a felony. In Bridget's case, they don't
fill in the rest, not. Publicly, who were the?
Two men at the shell was one of them Spencer?
Was the other a? Lieutenant, how did Spencer's
(08:15):
orbit and Bridget's overlap? Escort OPS a debt.
A warning, A punishment? Did someone order this and if?
So what was? The price of disobedience Here
is what we think happened and why.
We believe Bridget was killed because she.
Was trying to leave the operation.
(08:35):
Not a hunch, a pattern. Start with her words.
And behavior in the days. Before she died.
Friends say Bridget confided shemight be pregnant and was scared
to tell the man controlling her.Life that fear.
Tracks with a known flashpoint in trafficking dynamics.
Pregnancy shifts. Power.
(08:56):
It can slow movement, complicatebookings and trigger violent
discipline. If a girl talks.
About stepping away. The fear also.
Shows up in her calls. Short, clipped conversations.
Abruptly ended when certain names came up.
That is exit energy behavior. A young woman working an escape
plan while trying not to make noise.
(09:18):
Look at the movements that night.
She's in her own car, but she's not driving.
Two men are with her at the memorial.
Dr. Shell, a witness, says she looked extremely nervous when a
victim is seated passenger side in her own vehicle with
handlers. That's transport, not a date.
It suggests she wasn't moving freely and it aligns with a
(09:40):
common pre exit scenario. The crew intercepts her under
the cover of a ride. A gig or a talk?
You don't bring two men to a friendly conversation, you bring
two men to control outcomes. Consider the car dump near Stone
Mountain. Close to where?
Christopher Crisco. Spencer operated.
That's not where you leave a vehicle when a date goes wrong
(10:02):
by accident. That's where you leave.
A vehicle when you want it recovered in your footprint.
Because fear of a. Witness is gone once the
message. Is delivered it also.
Tells you the decision makers were comfortable on that turf.
She wasn't. The Sprite bottle with.
Spencer's DNA is more than a labresult.
It's a snapshot of power dynamics.
(10:23):
He wasn't anxious. He was calm enough to drink.
Leave. Saliva and walk away.
Girls trying to run don't. Pause to sip soda.
Men staging a lesson due his presence in her car on the last
night of her life collapses a dozen theories and elevates 1
enforcement. The ammunition choice RIP rounds
(10:46):
fits that enforcement logic. They're expensive, uncommon, and
communicate intent. This is not a robbery, this is a
sanction. Combine that with her being shot
from above while prone and the public staging nude in a family
park at dawn and the. Choreography reads like policy.
Not impulse in trafficking and gang enforcement.
(11:09):
Public degradation is a tactic. It erases dignity and broadcast
control to anyone else thinking of leaving.
Her digital. Footprint strengthens the.
Exit hypothesis. The Backpage aliases.
Nastia Spice. Show a controlled rotation.
When a girl is actively making money for a crew, she's an
(11:31):
asset. When she signals she's done, she
becomes liability and knowledge.A 19 year old who knows phones,
routes, faces and safe apartments and is scared enough
to whisper she's pregnant is someone a crew might decide to.
Neutralize rather. Than risk defection or
disclosure. Add the domestic volatility.
(11:51):
Bridget reported being hit, thengot into a fight with her
boyfriend's child's mother, all while sharing a cramped home.
That's a pressure cooker. Exits often begin with domestic
flashpoints, arguments that pusha victim to say I'm done.
To pack a bag to reach. Out to a friend her playful
Snapchat too pretty to walk in the grass posted near where she
(12:15):
would be found can read like denial or defiance in the early
hours of a plan to. Bolt by the shell.
Station that defiance. Looks replaced by fear.
And then there's the silence from the men at the Shell.
Detectives have never named thempublicly.
No one has claimed they were just giving her a ride.
(12:36):
If this were consensual movementthat turned random, someone
talks in controlled exits. No one talks because the outcome
was the point. Thread these clues together.
The pregnancy fear, the clipped calls, the handlers in her car,
the Spencer DNA, the specialty rounds, the public degradation,
(12:57):
the Stone Mountain dump. And you don't get a lover's
quarrel or a random predator. You get enforcement for
disobedience, the textbook consequence for a girl trying to
leave a money machine she didn'tcontrol.
To understand the why beyond onenight, you need to understand
Atlanta in that moment and the currents underneath its skyline
(13:17):
glow. By the mid 2000s teens, Atlanta
had become the. Hollywood of the South.
Sound stages, Music video budgets.
Nightclub residencies, Festival money for young women.
The city's promise was intoxicating.
Modeling gigs, Brand ambassador,work club hosting the fantasy
(13:39):
that one good photo shoot could turn into a career.
But the same promise created hunting grounds, the sex
economy. Here is a sophisticated.
Machine IT recruits from Instagram DMS, club bathrooms,
modeling agencies. With glossy websites.
And no licensing. It advertises on platforms like
(14:00):
Backpage, then and Now, on encrypted channels and
alternative. Sites rotating.
Names and faces, changing numbers, moving the product,
where the money goes. Conventions.
Sports weekends. Music festivals.
Now the part Atlanta. Rarely says out loud.
The Los Angeles pipeline and howit.
Took root here beginning. In the 1990s and accelerating
(14:24):
through the 2000s, documented members and affiliates of major
Los Angeles sets, Rolling 60s, Neighborhood Crips, 8 Tray,
Gangster Crips, Hoover Criminals, and subsets like the
Rolling 20s migrated or were sent to the Southeast.
Some came chasing music, money, and cheaper cost of living.
Some were transplants through family relocation, parole moves
(14:48):
or expansion assignments. Atlanta's position as a
transportation hub and later a film and music capital made it
ideal ground rolling 60s neighborhood.
Crips established a real. Footprint in metro Atlanta by
the late 2000s, particularly in DeKalb in the South Side.
Blending St. level trafficking with party promotion and club.
(15:10):
Security. Their model emphasized
structure, tiers, protocols. Designated earners and enforcers
investigations in the 2000 tens tied rolling 60 sets to guns,
narcotics, fraud and enforcementaround the sex economy when it
intersected with profit streams.8 Trey Gangster Crips imported.
(15:35):
The volatility that. Defined the LA.
Turf war era. Home invasions robberies fast
retaliation in Atlanta 8 tray Gangster Crips activity surfaced
in robbery crews and Interstate fraud rings with cross
pollination into escort protection and discipline when
artists and models overlapped with money movers Hoover
(15:59):
criminals various Hoover sets known for smash and.
Grab Burglary. Rings and taxing strategies in
LA. Hoover affiliated crews.
In the A linked to high speed. Theft crews.
Gun pipelines and selective control over dancers and escorts
tied to certain clubs and promoters.
(16:19):
Rolling 20's the set most visibly linked to the Spencer
cases in Georgia court. Records.
In metro Atlanta and adjacent counties, rolling 20s function
like mobile strike. Squads tasked crews that could
pivot. From a targeted robbery to a
punitive hit, their work bled into the sex economy in the same
way it has on the West Coast as security, transport, debt
(16:43):
collection and punishment for perceived disobedience.
Why Atlanta? Three reasons.
Law enforcement and academics. Site Mobility.
I20I-75. I-80.
Five and the. World's busiest airport.
Money, music, film boom, convention and sports tourism
(17:03):
and cover dense suburbs, extended stay hotels and a
nightlife ecosystem where VIP lists, hostings and modeling
blur into booking systems. By the early to mid 2000, tens
joint operations between APD DeKalb.
GB IFB. I and HSI repeatedly identified
(17:24):
LA origin sets embedded in MetroCruise, sometimes collaborating
with local bloods and hybrid cliques, sometimes running
parallel tracks. The result wasn't cosplay, it
was a merger. West Coast discipline stitched
onto Southern Opportunity. Once those systems rooted
enforcement looked familiar to anyone who studied LA in the 80s
(17:46):
and 90s. Highly performative violence
designed to travel by word of mouth.
Specialty ammo public staging bodies left in highly.
Visible places cars. Move to set heavy zones like
Stone Mountain and South. DeKalb.
Where crews felt insulated and in the overlapping sex economy,
(18:07):
the rules. Mirrored the coast the.
Phone and the aliases belong to the set.
Security is a euphemism for control.
Leaving is treated as. Theft or.
Treason in that world. Certain.
Details become code RIP. Ammunition means expense, intent
and a desire to leave a calling card.
(18:28):
Nudity at a dump site is not sexual, it is humiliation.
A public. Park at dawn is not clumsy.
It is choreography an. Abandoned car near Stone
Mountain where a known shooter hunts is not random.
It is geography. And there is another geography,
the map of a city at war with exploitation.
(18:50):
Federal and state task forces call metro Atlanta a high
intensity corridor for human trafficking.
Hartsfield. Jackson International moves more
people than any airport in the world.
Conventions, sports and entertainment weekends flood
hotels with anonymous traffic and cash.
Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI's Metro
(19:11):
Atlanta Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force,
GBI's HEAT unit and local department stage periodic
stings. They recover minors.
They arrest buyers, facilitators.
Pimps The Georgia legislature has stiffened penalties.
Created vacateur pathways for survivors.
(19:31):
Funded victim services and pushed awareness into schools
and hotels. And yet.
Advocates will tell you the. Pipeline is still fed by the
same sources. Kids aging out of foster care,
Runaways, couch surfers, those fleeing domestic violence and
those drawn by the city's promise.
With no money to float the month, the entertainment mirage
(19:55):
lures the street eats when exported.
Sets. Graphed onto that pipeline, the
violence looks a certain way. Quick, organized, punishing and
meant to ripple rolling 60s in Atlanta.
Built tears cruise with. Assignments. 8 tray brought
volatility. Robberies.
Home invasions. Retaliation.
(20:16):
Hits Hoover Set Specialized. In smash and grab and
enforcement that bled into sex economy control when it paid the
rolling 20s tied to Spencer in multiple cases moved like a
mobile strike team tasked armed in and out.
Inside those economies, information is currency.
(20:38):
A 19 year old who knows roots, phones, photos and names and
wants out becomes a cost center.Bridget's family has lived
inside that math ever since. Beverly.
Still sets a place for memory. She talks about Bridget.
Like the girl is in the next room.
How she would get ready to slowly.
How she'd. Leave a mess.
(20:59):
How bright her laugh used to be at breakfast.
Jim remembers her stubborn streak and the way she softened
when she felt. Safe.
The house is quieter now, but the silence is not peace.
It is weight, the weight of whatifs, the weight of A.
Justice that names a killer, butnot a reason.
(21:20):
Reporters. Call when there's movement in
the other cases when Spencer loses another appeal when a Co
defendant gets sentenced. When a judge reads a stack of.
Victim statements into the record each time Beverly feels
the strange. Duality.
Relief that a dangerous man is locked forever.
Frustration that Bridget is still a footnote in a broader
(21:42):
biography of violence. The investigation in Bridget's
case has leaned more on forensics than on eyewitness
recollection. The Sprite bottle, the car.
The Shell station footage, the casings.
There's no public evidence that Kevin was charged in her murder.
His denials stand. Brittany has declined comment.
(22:04):
The two men at the shell remain unnamed.
Detectives keep certain threads close because they must, because
sometimes cases flatten when they're too.
Public because a trial. That never comes is a secret
that never speaks. Even with those gaps, the
outline is clear enough to sliceskin.
Bridget lived under pressure with an older boyfriend.
(22:26):
She reported violence. She feared a pregnancy.
She appeared in escort listings with aliases.
She was seen distressed in her own car with two men.
Her car was dumped near Stone Mountain.
A known killer's DNA is on a bottle inside it.
She was. Executed with specialty.
Ammunition and left naked in a park designed for families.
(22:50):
There are chilling subplots, too, accounts that Bridget had
enemies she didn't name, that phones were taken, that a
promise of a gig. Was the bait.
Friends say she became jumpier, scanning rooms, answering, then
hanging up fast, cutting calls short when certain names were
spoken. She told one friend she feared
(23:10):
she was in trouble. The friend thought she meant
money. The friend thinks differently
now to. Tell the story right?
You also have to tell the story.Of a city that monetized out of
town dreams and out of town muscle.
You cannot sell Atlanta as the place where anything can happen
without asking who profits when anything is allowed to happen.
(23:33):
You cannot shoot a music video on Memorial Drive and ignore the
gas station lights that. Hosted the last Clear.
Footage of a teenager who wantedto be seen for her beauty, not
her autopsy. Scars.
There are other voices here too.Advocates who sit in hospital
waiting rooms and talk. Survivors through the paperwork.
Detectives who go home with the smell of cut grass and gunpowder
(23:56):
in their. Clothes prosecutors.
Who pin timelines to courtroom walls and stare at the spaces
where motives should be. Mothers who warned daughters
that Adm from a photographer. Is usually a flyer.
For a nightmare, fathers who learned too late that their
pride in a daughter's hustle blinded them to the hands that
guided it. And there is a simple, ugly
(24:18):
business rule underneath everything in this economy,
silence is enforced. If you speak, if you leave.
If you embarrass the wrong person, someone sends a message.
RIP rounds a public. Park a body.
Stripped of dignity but not of worth, Bridget had worth beyond
(24:40):
measure. So what remains?
Almost a decade. Later.
Open questions that matter. Was Bridget targeted because she
tried to? Leave an operation because she
owed money. Because she carried a secret or
a child. Were the two men at the shell
acting on orders or improvising violence in a car that wasn't
(25:02):
theirs? Did the person who chose the
ammunition also choose the location?
Or was that? Decision made in panic after a
plan went sideways. How many other names sit in
case? Files where the.
Pattern looks like this escort listings, a gas station, a dump
site, and the only difference isthe zip code detectives may know
(25:25):
more than they can. Say prosecutors.
May be holding motive threads for a courtroom that may never
be convened because the man at the center.
Is already buried alive by. Stacked sentences, sometimes
justice. Is a locked door.
Without an explanation, sometimes the truth is trapped
in the mouth of a witness. Too scared to speak?
(25:46):
For Beverly and Jim, that silence is its own cruelty.
For Atlanta, the lesson is not abstract.
You cannot map the city's boom without mapping the economies
that shadow it. You cannot celebrate the
entertainment machine and pretend not to hear its gears
grind up the vulnerable. You cannot remember Bridget only
at the end of her life. You must remember the beginning,
(26:09):
the girl who wanted cameras and sunlight, who believed in her
face and her future. Who moved to a city?
To be seen, and was finally seenonly as evidence.
If you are listening to this in your car on your way to a shoot,
or in your room packing to move to Atlanta for a dream, write
this into your plan. Insist on contracts on daylight
(26:31):
meetings, on bringing someone with you, on controlling your
phone, on not letting anyone hold your IDs, on choosing rides
you can end if a message in yourgut says turn around.
Treat that like gospel. And if you're already inside and
want out, there are numbers to call and people who will meet
you where you are, advocates whodon't need your story to be.
(26:54):
Pretty to fight for you. Bridget should have been given
the chance to grow up. She wasn't.
The least we can do is say her name, trace the pattern, and cut
it where we can by telling the truth out loud, even when the
people who enforce silence are still listening.
If you. Like this episode and our
podcast? Be sure to share on social
media. Leave a 5 star.
(27:16):
Rating and positive review. Up next is the song Headlines
from the soundtrack for novel The Price of Silence.
A No. Tears for black girls.
Story written by. Our show's creator, JC Reedberg.
The Price of Silence is available now on Amazon and for
a free download on Amazon Kindle.
(27:36):
Stay loved, stay blessed. And stay safe.
This is Samantha Paul. For every queen whose story
never made the headlines, this is your anthem, your testimony.
(28:10):
The stone So this crowd up, riseup, speed up.
Now we ain't asking for permission and we call. 35 And
brilliant dreams cut through thewindshield.
Another birthday stolen, Anothertruth concealed.
(28:33):
Where's the breaking news? When black Queens disappear, My
city knows your name, even if cameras weren't there.
When I report my truth, Why is the system so quiet?
When we scream for justice, why they try to deny it?
My melanin magnificent. My power undeniable.
My story we're telling. My life irreplaceable.
Can you feel that? Thunder Sisters rising up.
(28:57):
Breaking. Through the silence, say.
It's time and love, don't tell astory.
Don't tell it right. Glory the fight to survive.
In a. World that tries to minimize.
Not anymore. 1 Queens vanished, but who's
(29:27):
counting beside us? Brown skin missing, system
dismissing. That's the crisis.
Give white victims prime time while our faces just flash.
We're more than your crime scene, more than a broadcast
from Vine City to Decatur, we'recreating our haven mothers
organizing searches when the system's misbehaving.
My billboard should bear the names and lights so bright.
Justice delayed ain't justice. We fighting day and night.
(29:48):
So powerful. Deliver Can you hear them
calling? We hear you calling.
Drink concrete and steal you. The voices of my.
Sister too powerful to conceal There's a new birther.
Rallies at 5 points. Between the city streets, a
revolution. Spirit and a glory, the fight to
(30:15):
survive. In a.
World that tries to minimize anymore.
For every sister lost but never forgotten, Every story untold
(30:39):
but still unfolding. We don't just survive, we
thrive. We don't just remember, we rise.
My name is worth remembering, mystory deserves Tavern, my life
is worth fighting for, and my legacy just begin.
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