Shot by Police, Remembered by Balladeer My cover article, "A Snitch's Dilemma," from this week's magazine opens with the tale of Kathryn Johnston's murder. Johnston was a 92-year-old living alone in a rough part of Atlanta called the Bluff. Around 7 p.m. on Nov. 21, 2006, eight police officers approached her house, with a warrant obtained on the basis of a false affidavit. They didn't knock or announce themselves as they tore through her security gate. As I wrote of Johnston in my piece: No doubt she was terrified. That is why, as the cops got closer and closer, she found her gun. And why, as the door was opening, she fired one shot. It didn't hit anyone. But it provoked a hail of return fire - 39 shots, 5 or 6 of which hit her (and some of which struck other policemen). By the time the officers burst inside, Kathryn Johnston lay in a pool of blood. The murder set into motion a strange chain of events for Alex White, the drug dealer and informant at the center of my story. It also inspired these lines: And now my city hangs her head in shame You can't tell the truth from all the lies Everything changed forever and everything stayed the same On the night Miss Johnston died These come from "The Ballad of Kathryn Johnston," which appears on the 2008 album "Honeydew" by the singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins. Mullins was born in Atlanta and is still based there, and in singing Johnston's story follows in the tradition of protest songs going back to Bob Dylan ("Hurricane"), Woody Guthrie ("Deportee") and blues and British folk ballads before that.