The Atlanta Beltline Eastside Trail

This guide to the Atlanta Beltline Eastside Trail follows one ordinary Thursday in May 2026, when police found a bicycle abandoned on the gravel beside the trail, its wheels still spinning and no rider in sight. It traces the hour before that discovery, a stabbing near the Northeast Trail junction and an attack on a postal worker minutes earlier, and the twenty-one-year-old suspect's history of prior arrests and a court-ordered mental health evaluation. You'll hear how officers pieced the two attacks together from that single bicycle. The trail today runs along the same rail bed that once carried freight trains a century ago, now crowded with joggers and cyclists.