Most folks who live along Cascade Road on Atlanta's southwest side know the shaded sidewalks and inviting front porches mask the real story of their neighborhood: Drugs and petty crime, they say, are rampant. In a recent two-week period, residents reported 73 burglaries and 19 cases of aggravated assault.

On Tuesday morning, the violence reached a new level when two police officers, apparently trying to clean up the streets, were shot. Police returned fire, killing one suspect and wounding another.

Brant Sanderlin/bsanderlin@ajc.com

The officers were shot on Cascade Road in Atlanta.

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Neither officer suffered life-threatening injuries, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington told reporters at Grady Memorial Hospital, and the officers were released from the hospital late Tuesday afternoon. The department refused to release the officer's names or any other information about them.

Back on Cascade Road, the ordeal left residents wondering: How -- and, perhaps more importantly, why -- did it come to this?

"It's getting bad, worse by the day," said Larry Sloan, who's lived in the area all of his 62 years. "These kids are getting out of control, but we didn't think things were this bad."

Pennington and department spokesmen at the scene gave this account of what happened:

About 11 a.m., two Zone 4 officers were on patrol as part of an effort to curb the burglary problem. They saw two men and a woman sitting outside a house and attempted to question them. The officers asked the young people to approach and reportedly ordered them to take their hands out of their pockets.

One man pulled out an automatic weapon and fired at the officers, striking both. The officers returned fire, killing the gunman and wounding the other man.

The wounded man and the young woman were quickly taken in custody. The identities of the three people weren't released.

Pennington said police were still investigating why the men and the woman were in front of the house.

One officer was shot in the face. The other was hit in the chest but was shielded by a bulletproof vest, Pennington said.

Ruby Matthews, 71, who lives a few streets over, heard about the shooting on the television news. Her brother lives a few houses down from the crime scene.

"I thought, 'Oh my God. I hope it's not him' and ran right over here," said Matthews, who didn't want to give her brother's name. "This is just getting out of control. I'm frightened for him, for me, for everyone."

Yolanda Jackson, who was campaigning in the area for a sheriff's candidate, said she was about 200 yards away when she heard "more than four shots" fired.

"Everybody ran for cover," she said.

The owner of the home, Jerry McPherson of Atlanta, said he was not present during the shooting.

"The house was being worked on; it was under renovation," he said.

McPherson said police interviewed him and a contractor.

The shooting was also the first time an Atlanta police officer had been shot since February 2007.

It was the third high-profile crime for the Cascade Road corridor in two weeks.

• Early Sunday, someone shot a convenience store clerk on Cascade during a dispute about a T-shirt. The clerk died. The gunman remains at large. The store, located across the street of the Community Church of God, is within walking distance of Tuesday's shootings.

• On the evening of July 2, a man walked into a Starbucks on Cascade near I-285 and shot former Atlanta city attorney Clifford Hardwick, 56, and Timothy Strayhorn, 43, according to Fulton County police.

Hardwick had serious injuries. Strayhorn was less seriously hurt.

That gunman remains at large.

Between March and mid-June, 633 residential burglaries, 204 robberies and 198 aggravated assaults were reported in and around Cascade Heights, according to police records.

Cascade is a busy commercial corridor stretching from unincorporated southwest Fulton County to inner-city Atlanta. The Starbucks shooting took place in a busy stretch of Cascade that features a Publix shopping center, bank branches and mid-level chain restaurants. The other two shootings happened in a more residential stretch of the road closer to downtown Atlanta.

-- Staff researcher Richard Hallman contributed to this report.