A fire chief was shot and killed after he and a driver who hit a deer on a rural Alabama road were shot at as they approached a home for help, officials said. the authorities.
Sheriff’s deputies responded around 5 p.m. Sunday to a report of a traffic accident involving a deer near the Georgia border, the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
They found three men with gunshot wounds. James Bartholomew Cauthen, 54, a Coweta County Fire Battalion Chief in Newnan, Georgia, was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver, whose name has not been released, and a man identified as William Randall Franklin were taken by helicopter to a hospital to be treated for gunshot wounds, the sheriff’s office said.
Mike Segrest, a prosecutor for Alabama’s 5th Judicial Circuit, said in an email Tuesday that Mr. Franklin had been charged with murder.
Authorities said Chief Cauthen stopped to help the driver and the two men sought help nearby in the small community of Stroud, Alabama. As they did so, Mr. Franklin “opened fire on Chief Cauthen and the individual who struck the driver.” deer,” the sheriff’s office said. “All individuals were injured during the shooting.”
“They started walking down a driveway and an individual who lived in the residence where that driveway was located came out and started shooting,” Chambers County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Mike Parrish told WTVM- TV from Columbus, Georgia.
Deputy Parrish, who could not be reached Tuesday, told WTVM that all three men were armed. A dispatcher said he could not answer calls due to bad weather in the area.
“You pull up and three people are shot — it doesn’t make sense any way you look at it,” he told the station. “We really didn’t know what happened. It was just weird.
Chief Cauthen, known as Bart, had worked for more than 24 years for the Coweta County Fire Department in Newnan, about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. The ministry did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
It was not immediately clear why Chief Cauthen was in the area where the accident occurred. Stroud, a small unincorporated community, is about six and a half miles from the Georgia state line.
