Two underpaid employees at an East Point car dealership had been hounding their boss for a raise. Instead, the boss gave them each a bullet to the head, police said.
Fed up with the two workers' frequent salary demands, owner Rolandas Milinavicius — who was in dire financial straits — apparently snapped Thursday morning and allegedly shot both of them to death inside the business.
“He told us that he was under a lot of stress,” said East Point police Capt. Russell Popham. “Unfortunately, he decided to take his anger out with violence.”
Milinavicius, 38, of Alpharetta started RM Auto International on Willingham Drive two years ago amid great hopes that he could feed the demands for American cars in his native Lithuania. He began shipping cars through ports in Charleston, S.C., and elsewhere, and at some point hired the two victims – fellow immigrants from his north European country – as his only employees.
Little is known about the first victim, Inga Contreras, 25. She lived in Atlanta but did not have any other family members in the state.
The second, Martynas Simokaitis, 28, moonlighted at night as a staff photographer for Lunar, a magazine about metro Atlanta's electronic dance music culture. He had been in Atlanta only a few years, and was working toward a career in his chosen field: music.
Back home, he had played in a brass orchestra, worked at radio stations and night clubs, produced television pilots for two music shows and started his own artist management agency.
Thursday morning, Milinavicius' wife called his office repeatedly but could not reach anyone on the phone. At the same time, a neighboring business in the industrial area of East Point noticed that the door to RM Auto's loading dock was still shut. By that time of the day, it usually was wide open.
The concerned wife walked into the shop that afternoon and discovered Simokaitis' body on the office floor. He had been shot several times, in the head and upper body, the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office said.
Panicked, the wife ran out and called police. Officers then discovered the second body in the same area. Contreras had been shot once in the head with the same handgun.
It didn't look as though either worker had put up a fight, said Popham, the police captain.
The double-murders were among 11 homicides in Fulton County last week, and East Point police launched an elaborate hunt.
Two days later, Milinavicius turned himself in and confessed to the killing, Popham said.
“As I understand, the employees were not really happy about the pay, and they had questioned him about it over the course of time,” Popham said. “That morning he said he just snapped.”
Milinavicius is scheduled to appear before a judge today , charged with two counts of murder. His family did not return several calls seeking comment.
The two victims were cremated and an informal memorial service held at Simokaitis' cousin's apartment over the weekend. The remains are expected to be flown to Lithuania today.
“It doesn't make any sense,” the cousin, Jaunius Simokaitis, of Fayetteville, said Monday evening. “If he was having money problems, these two would have been the ones to help him get out of debt. They would have helped him make that money.
“We're a very small community here,” he added. “We look out for each other.”
