Atlanta police have charged a 34-year-old man with murder after officers responding to a late-night domestic dispute in southwest Atlanta found a 4-year-old girl with multiple lacerations inside a locked apartment, authorities said.
The child, identified by police as Zuri Dixon, was taken to a hospital after officers used de-escalation tactics to separate her from an injured adult male inside the apartment, police said. She later died from her wounds. By Monday, homicide investigators had obtained warrants for Rashad Dixon on murder and several other charges, but key parts of the case, including the motive and the full sequence of events inside the home, had not been publicly explained.
Police said officers were dispatched at about 11:30 p.m. Saturday, March 14, to the 1900 block of Alison Court SW after a call about an injured person tied to a domestic dispute. Lt. Christopher Butler told local television stations that when officers arrived, the apartment door was locked. Officers then entered through a window and found a man holding the injured child. Police said the girl had multiple lacerations and the man also appeared to have lacerations on his body. Officers used de-escalation tactics to get the girl away from him safely, Butler said, and medics rushed her to the hospital. She later died from her injuries. The man was taken into custody at the scene and transported for medical treatment. On Sunday morning, Atlanta police said homicide investigators had established probable cause and secured arrest warrants for Rashad Dixon. Police later identified the girl as Zuri Dixon.
The charges announced by police were broad and serious. Authorities said Rashad Dixon was booked on warrants that include murder, aggravated assault, aggravated battery, first-degree cruelty to children, possession of a knife during the commission of a felony, false imprisonment, two counts of criminal damage to property and simple assault. Police said he remained in custody. Even with that list of charges, investigators had not publicly described the exact trigger for the violence or said whether the confrontation began as an argument between adults, how long it lasted or whether anyone else inside the apartment was physically injured. Atlanta police also said early in the investigation that the relationships among the people involved were still being determined. Family members interviewed by local stations identified Rashad Dixon as the child’s father. WSB-TV reported that relatives said the adults involved were not married and that a baby only a few months old was also in the home at the time. Police had not publicly confirmed those family details by Monday.
Witness accounts offered a picture of a chaotic and fast-moving scene, though police had not verified every detail described by neighbors. Jevouhn Hamilton, who spoke to Atlanta News First and FOX 5, said he heard a man and woman arguing before the situation escalated. Hamilton said the woman was demanding, “Give me my kids,” and that the man ran upstairs with the children and locked himself inside. Another witness quoted by WSB-TV said the child had been calling for her father while adults argued. A neighbor in an adjacent unit told the station she heard heavy banging through the wall, strong enough to shake her bed, but did not hear much yelling. By the time police arrived, neighbors said the apartment complex parking lot had turned frantic. Reporters at the scene described blood on a vehicle in the lot and on a window at one of the units. WSB-TV also reported a Jeep nearby had a shattered rear window and two slashed tires. Police have not said how that property damage fits into the timeline or whether it is directly tied to the charged offenses.
The case quickly became one of the city’s most wrenching weekend homicide investigations because it began as a domestic disturbance call and ended with a young child dead. Atlanta police have long described family violence cases as among the most difficult calls officers handle because scenes are often chaotic, accounts conflict and children may be present even when they are not the initial focus of the dispute. In July 2025, the department updated its family violence policy to stress that domestic violence must be treated as a serious criminal offense and that officers should identify the predominant aggressor when facts are contested. State data shows children are often present in these cases. The Georgia Commission on Family Violence said in a 2025 fact sheet that nearly a third of reported family violence incidents in Georgia in 2024 involved a child being present. That statistic does not explain what happened inside the Alison Court apartment, but it helps show the wider context in which police and child welfare agencies operate when domestic disputes turn violent.
By Monday, the legal process was moving faster than the public explanation of the case. The warrants signaled that investigators believed they had enough evidence to support the charges while the homicide investigation continued. Still, several important procedural steps remained ahead. Police had not publicly detailed a first court appearance, whether prosecutors would seek to hold Dixon without bond, whether a knife had been recovered or whether forensic testing had tied a specific weapon to the injuries. Authorities also had not released any medical examiner findings beyond saying the child died after suffering multiple lacerations. As the case moves forward, court filings could provide a clearer narrative of what happened in the apartment, which witness statements investigators found credible and how physical evidence matched those accounts. Additional police updates may also answer whether the simple assault, false imprisonment and criminal damage charges relate to the child’s mother, another adult at the scene or damage inside or outside the apartment.
For residents of the apartment complex, the killing left behind the kind of details that are hard to forget. Hamilton told FOX 5 that neighbors at first thought the argument would fade out like many others. “We didn’t think anything of it,” he said. “Once we heard a shatter of the glass, we heard a kid screaming, and that’s how we knew something serious was going down.” Another neighbor told WSB-TV that the moment that stayed with her was seeing a distraught woman in the parking lot asking whether her children were safe. Those remarks do not settle the unanswered parts of the case, but they help explain why the stabbing shook people far beyond the apartment itself. What had sounded at first like a fight between adults became a fatal crime scene involving a young child, a locked residence, a forced police entry and a neighborhood left trying to understand how events moved so quickly from argument to death.
As of Monday, Rashad Dixon was in custody, Zuri Dixon’s death remained an active homicide investigation and police had not publicly filled in the still-missing timeline from the final minutes inside the apartment. The next likely milestone is a court appearance or a fuller police account of the evidence behind the charges.
Author note: Last updated March 16, 2026.