DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 9:33 a.m. March 25, 2009
COBB COUNTY
Scientist describes shooting that paralyzed her
Stray bullet struck Shelly Williams, a renowned primatologist
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Shelly Williams was on the verge of making history when a bullet from Elliott Mitchell’s gun ended her distinguished career and put her in a wheelchair, a Cobb County prosecutor said Tuesday.
Mitchell’s gun discharged when he pistol-whipped Terrance Reid, who went to the Smyrna strip shopping center to buy drugs from the men. The bullet struck Williams, who was running an errand. “An innocent woman,” Reid said.
Mikki K. Harris
Shelly Williams sits outside her home in Smyrna. “I’ve been held up in the Congo by rebels, but I come back home and get shot down the street. It doesn’t make sense,” she says.
Mitchell and Kendall Bolden thought “robbing drug dealers was easy money” so they had a plan to steal Reid’s jewelry and the $20,000 he was expected to be carrying.
Prosecutor Jesse Evans said that, on that day, Nov. 7, 2005, Williams was “on the verge of making a ground breaking discovery” of what could possibly be a new species. Now that will never happen because she can never return to the African jungle where she is believed to have found an ape that appears to be a cross between a chimpanzee and a gorilla.
“I will never be able to walk again,” Williams testified.
Wearing a jail jumpsuit and waist chains, Bolden pleaded guilty on Monday and testified against his former co-defendant on Tuesday.
Reid, also in a jail uniform because he is serving a North Carolina sentence on a drug conviction, also testified against Mitchell, telling how they came to be in the same parking lot at Spring Road and Cobb Parkway when Williams and her husband were running an errand.
According to testimony, Shannon Clay, a third person who coordinated the meeting, told Bolden and Mitchell where and when to find Reid.
Reid resisted and tried to jump out of the Dodge Ram pickup. Mitchell hit him with the butt of a handgun and the gun discharged.
When the bullet hit Williams, she fell back, slamming her head on the pavement. She recalled that she couldn’t feel her legs.
“‘Gun shot. White truck. Gun shot. White truck,’” Williams said she repeated to her husband as he tried to tend to her. “I was afraid I was going to die. “
Without emotion for about 10 minutes Tuesday, Williams, 53, described the afternoon of the shooting. The white truck was the borrowed Dodge Ram pickup Williams saw driving away at the moment she was shot.
And she remembered a lot of detail in the minutes before she passed out.
Williams saw, “what I thought was a puff of white smoke” and then heard “a lot of screeching of car tires … a lady ran over and said ‘Should I call 911?’”
She also recalled the face of a paramedic before passing out.
Williams was preparing to return to the northern Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa to collect more documentation of her find when she was shot and paralyzed.
At the time, her discovery was described as possibly the most significant wildlife discovery in decades.
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