Police seek clues to who murdered an Atlanta mother
Investigators and family members in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth continued seeking clues Tuesday to explain why anybody would shoot to death a 40-year-old mother as she waited to pick up her daughter from work. After all, authorities say, the car that was stolen from Genai Coleman Friday night, when she was gunned down outside a Red Lobster restaurant, was an old Dodge; plus, she had no enemies anyone knew about. A stunned Geraldine Brown, who flew to Atlanta from Elkhart, Ind., immediately after hearing that her daughter had been shot, said the car certainly was “nothing worth being killed over,” according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They had the car, why did they have to shoot her?” Coleman, a single preschool teacher at Montclair Elementary School in DeKalb County, took in and raised three foster daughters (now ages 19, 21 and 23) at her home in Snellville, Ga., the Journal-Constitution reports. “‘Genai’ means “one who loves people,” and she did just that, her mother said.

Detroit’s Kilpatrick has some legal team

If Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has to cough up some more cash, gets booted out of office or winds up in jail behind the scandals swirling around him these days, it certainly won’t be due to a lack of legal representation. The Detroit News reports that the embattled city chief, who is “confronting legal challenges on at least six fronts, has assembled a huge team of attorneys to fight an array of civil lawsuits and attempts to remove him from office without compromising job one – defending Kilpatrick on felony charges.” Such a seemingly humongous effort, according to the News, requires at least 17 public and private attorneys. BET.com/News has more on this story. Should Kilpatrick step down, or is there a witch hunt against the mayor?

A Georgia school gets the paddles ready for the fall
To spank or not to spank … that’s the question in Twiggs County, Ga., where principals are breaking out their paddles this fall to deter misbehaving. It won’t be the first time that the school district puts the wood to students who act up. Last year, for example, a second-grader was swatted for throwing pencils, as were others who were deemed too unruly for the standard time-out or other methods of discipline, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. But the policy was rarely used. Teachers and administrators can opt out if they desire, and parents must sign a permission slip to allow their children to be paddled. Read more of what the parents and teachers had to say at BET.com/News.