HOW ONE COMMUNITY CAME TOGETHER IN SUPPORT
“Like it or not, all of us are here in this neighborhood together — it’s like you can’t choose your family,”
It was late afternoon in a subdivision an hour north of Atlanta when the chop of one helicopter, then another, began startling neighbors out of their weekday routines.
A man firing up his patio grill realized it wasn’t the usual medevac swooping toward the hospital. A retiree settling down to dinner went out front to see. A woman driving home from work saw the black helicopters from a distance, and as she got closer, realized they were hovering above her very own neighborhood, a huddle of beige houses, trimmed lawns and still-young maples called Saddlebrook.
Soon, homeowners were standing in front yards up and down Horseshoe Creek Lane and Walking Horse Trail, watching as patrol cars, black SUVs and FBI agents surrounded a house on the corner, the one with a shed in the back and a welcome wreath on the front door.
Text messages and phone calls began flying. It was Maria Taheb’s house. It was something involving her 21-year old son, Hasher, who used to speed through the neighborhood. He was being charged with plotting to blow up the White House. A “martyrdom operation,” as he allegedly described it to undercover agents. According to officials, he had been trying to buy grenades and a shoulder-fired antitank rocket when he was arrested in the parking lot of a Lowe’s, 20
minutes away.
Now the neighbors watched in the day’s last light as officers hauled away a computer and other items from the house in boxes and black duffel bags. They watched as the patrol cars drove away, and the helicopters flew off, and as quiet returned to the neighborhood on a Wednesday in January, there were all kinds of questions, including how their middle-class subdivision would react at a moment when American anger seemed to be rising, divisions seemed to be
deepening and the fullest range of reactions seemed possible.
The president of the homeowners association, Mickey Norris, was in Florida for business and began getting messages as worry spread about the prospect of co-conspirators, drive-by vigilantes and sinking property values, as well as about Maria, who was in the house alone, the blinds shut, not saying anything about what happened. He decided to schedule a meeting for as soon as he got back, and sent out a message:
“The Board has received numerous calls expressing concern for the unsettling events of this week in our community . . . Deputy Sheriff Beival will join us for a called Neighborhood Watch meeting this weekend . . . Mickey and Allason’s home . . . Wildflower Court, Sunday afternoon, 2 p.m.”
His house was one of 137 arranged on medium-sized lots carved into a swath of maple, oak and sycamore trees in Forsyth County, a place once known for being a rural, whites-only haven policed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Lynchings and other violence drove out nearly every black family from the county in 1912, and the threat of violence kept it almost entirely white into the 1980s, when civil rights marchers faced down white crowds hurling bottles and circling in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags. Meanwhile, the new State Route 400 was delivering Atlanta’s sprawl farther and farther north. By the time ground was broken for Saddlebrook in 2012, the area was known less for its
history than for being Exit 14, the latest blank slate in a borderland that was in every way transitioning from one version of the South to whatever was coming next.
Politically it was part of Georgia’s 7th Congressional District...READ MORE
