SHEILA A. MATHEWS :::
A Spalding County man was critically wounded in a Wednesday afternoon shooting that authorities are describing as a personal dispute.
Personnel of the Spalding County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched to a call reporting a person shot at approximately 2 p.m. in the 800 block of East McIntosh Road.
“The two people knew each other – they were affiliated with each other – and it appears to be related to some type of a civil dispute,” said Spalding County Sheriff Darrell Dix, later adding, “It was a dispute between two people who live together, who are sharing the same residence.”
The victim sustained a single gunshot wound to the right buttock and was transported by air ambulance to the Atlanta Medical Center trauma unit for treatment of possible internal bleeding, Dix said.
“The suspect was taken into custody and is being interviewed, and we have some witnesses that we are also in the process of interviewing now,” Dix said. “I can say he (the suspect) is someone that we are familiar with and a gun was recovered.”
Dix described the incident as unusual than most in that deputies struggled to locate the victim.
“The victim, when he was shot, he ran off into some woods off East McIntosh Road. He got down in the woods and got disoriented. He had his cell phone with him, and he was talking to dispatch, but he wasn’t able to tell them where he was,” he said. “All he could say is that he was in the woods and he could see a tower.”
The wounded man was able to provide another key piece of information – when he could hear patrol car sirens.
“We would have an officer hit a siren to see if he could hear it. At one point, the dispatcher even said we had to be close to him because they could hear the sirens,” Dix said. “After what seemed like an eternity, but it was probably only ten minutes or so, we were able to ping his phone and locate him, get him with EMS, get him medical treatment, get him loaded up and flown out.”
Throughout this time, the victim’s condition appeared to be rapidly deteriorating, lending greater urgency to the search.
“At different points, according to the dispatcher, it sounded like he was about to lose consciousness. It was really a matter of urgency,” Dix said. “It was kind of unusual. That’s the first time I’ve had that happen or seen that happen. Our folks were up there desperately trying to find him before he bled out, and they did an outstanding job.”
Dix did not have a status update on the victim and neither party had been identified at the time this article was published.
The GRIP will continue to follow this incident and report additional information as it becomes available.
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