Credit to Andy Ngo who mentioned this weird story on Twitter. This took place yesterday in Fayetteville, a small city south of Atlanta. An entire neighborhood was shut down by police for most of the day after they received a call from someone who claimed they’d been kidnapped:

The incident began when Fayette County 911 received a “trouble unknown” call around 7:48 this morning from a person whispering that they had been kidnapped by an organization and was being held in the garage of a residence. The caller was unable to provide a location, but dispatchers were able to trace the call and provide police with an approximate location. Once on the scene, police observed a person waving their hand from a garage window.

Police also observed a person walking a dog outside the residence, and when they approached the subject, the subject attempted to flee. The subject was taken into custody moments later and placed under arrest.

Nine occupants voluntarily left the residence when police by loudspeaker instructed everyone to evacuate. Officers at that time were told there was still one person inside.

Assisted by Fayette County Sheriff’s deputies and the Clayton County Police EOD Robotics Unit, a robot was dispatched into the residence to search for occupants. Police then discovered that the sole occupant was deceased as the result of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The really weird part is where this happened. The house occupied by 10 people was a communal space for a group called the Black Hammer Party. The Atlanta Journal Constitution has more on the group:

The home at the center of the standoff was the fringe organization’s communal house known as the “Hammer House,” according to social media posts from [Augustus] Romain.

Romain, who uses they/them pronouns, goes by the name, Gazi Kodzo in their public persona. Kodzo has more than 40,000 followers on Facebook and the group aggressively fundraises using its social platforms.

The Black Hammer Party mixes Black nationalist rhetoric and a revolutionary message with hot-button issues like anti-vaccine myths and election conspiracies, the AJC previously reported. The organization has drawn hundreds of followers across the nation over the last two years…

Last year, members of the group who were closest to Kodzo moved into a rented house in a suburban southside neighborhood in Riverdale. The group was evicted in December and owed $21,000 in unpaid rent, attorney’s fees and other charges, according to records in Clayton County State Court. Public records indicate the group then took up residence in the Fayetteville home that was the scene Tuesday’s shooting.

It looks like there new neighborhood is really nice based on the livestream that Romain/Kodzo did while the house was being investigated. In that video, parts of which were posted on Twitter, Kodzo said that someone who’d been staying in the house was becoming belligerent. “We were removing him from the home and I guess he called the police…” he said. In a subsequent clip he added, “This is all being started because of one psycho crazy person that was in the home.”

THE FBI TARGETS BLACK HAMMER: PT. 5 — Watch the full video at https://t.co/3StGHRcl1W pic.twitter.com/QPHCu3SzoR

— BH Times 🇷🇺 (@BlkHmmrTimes) July 19, 2022

The person who apparently shot themselves in the home was later identified as an 18-year-old. Police don’t appear to be certain if he’s the person who called them claiming to be kidnapped. However, Romain/Kodzo and another member of the Black Hammer group have been arrested on numerous charges including kidnapping.

He has been identified as 18-year-old Amonte T. Ammons. It’s unclear if he’s the person who called 911 to report that he had been kidnapped.

Police said that Augustus Romain, 36, and Xavier Rushin, 21, have both been arrested on numerous charges including kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated sodomy, conspiracy to commit a felony, false imprisonment and criminal street gang activity.

So who was Amonte Ammons? According to a website about the Black Hammer Party, he was the group’s minister of defense. They are now claiming he was “shot and killed” by the police:

In a targeted attack by the Fayetteville Police Department, SWAT and the FBI on the headquarters of the Atlanta chapter of the Black Hammer Party, Black Hammer’s Minister of Defense, AP, was shot and killed…

Minister of Defense AP housed, clothed and fed hundreds of homeless people in Atlanta every week. He dedicated his life to his people. And the colony took that life away. But what the pigs did not take away was the power that AP gave to every person sleeping on the streets who now feels safer and more secure because of the Black Hammer Party. You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.

None of this story makes sense to me at this point. I don’t believe the dead man was killed by the police but I also don’t know why he killed himself. Hopefully there will be an update on this story that will make it make sense. In any case, I found this earlier story about the Black Hammer Party. They apparently tried to set themselves up on a 40 acre lot in Colorado earlier this year but that didn’t go well.

They were about two dozen leftist revolutionaries, almost all people of color. In Denver and other U.S. cities, the group’s chapters had spent the pandemic handing out food and personal protective equipment while planning their signature project: Hammer City, a utopian settlement high in the Rocky Mountains free of coronavirus, cops, money and white people. Together they would renounce private property, work the land and build power.

Commenters on Facebook and Twitter widely ridiculed the concept as a “cult” doomed for failure. But the activists raised more than $60,000. On May 3, 2021, Augustus Romain Jr., the group’s commander-in-chief, posted a photo of 10 people standing among sagebrush with raised fists and a declaration on Facebook: Black Hammer had “liberated” 200 acres of land somewhere in Colorado. The soil, they wrote, was rich.

After Black Hammer narrowly failed to purchase its land, Hammer City joined the rich history of failed utopian projects in Colorado.

In the Beaver Pines subdivision and the community around nearby Norwood, population 600, the Black Hammer Organization left an impression. When the activists decamped May 17, what remained was a partially built footbridge, a property sign riddled with bullet holes and a local man shaken after an armed standoff.

So they left, Colorado in May and wound up near Atlanta where they first set up a group home in Riverdale and then, after not paying the rent, moved to the home in Fayetteville where the body was found yesterday. There’s plenty more on this group if you’re inclined to read more about them. What I don’t understand is why anyone would join or give money to this group which is pretty obviously a political cult. My guess is that if Romain/Kodzo is convicted he’ll continue recruiting followers in prison.

Update: Kodzo really working the local media in this report. Notice there’s no mention of the Black Hammer Party.