A neighborhood group is warning members that the man who was briefly a suspect in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey is now living in the community with his father.
The Chastain Park Civic Association sent an e-mail Thursday to its 2,000 member homeowners announcing that John Mark Karr had moved into his father’s home in the well-to-do Atlanta neighborhood, where houses sell for more than $600,000.
The e-mail noted that Wex Karr’s house is about three blocks from a playground.
John Mark Karr has “brought a lot of attention upon himself in the media, which is really ... frightening neighbors,” said Jim King, president of the neighborhood association.
The elder Karr’s home has a small “No Trespassing” sign in the front yard. The younger Karr has been spotted outside the house and walking down the street, King said. A man who answered the phone at the Karr home declined to comment and refused to identify himself.
May return to teaching
After John Mark Karr was released from a California jail on Oct. 5, he said he intended to live with his father in Atlanta and possibly return to teaching.
Karr has not been convicted of any crime that would require him to register as a sex offender or restrict where he can live or work.
“I understand he is a free man, but everything I’ve read about him seems a little unbalanced,” said Kim Berry, a mother of three teenagers who lives several houses away from the elder Karr.
“It’s not a good situation.”
Soon after taking a teaching job in Thailand, Karr was arrested in August and brought to the United States after he claimed to have killed JonBenet, the child beauty queen found strangled in her home in Boulder, Colo., in 1996.
Authorities later said DNA evidence showed Karr confessed to a crime he did not commit.
After being cleared in the slaying, Karr was sent to California to face charges of possessing child pornography. But the case was dropped and he was released Oct. 5 because investigators had lost crucial evidence.