New details in Georgia mass shooting: 10 of 35 injured had no gunshot wounds

VIENNA — Ten of the 35 people injured at a neighborhood block party that turned into a mass shooting here didn’t suffer gunshot wounds, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation.

In the hours after the predawn shooting early Sunday, which also claimed two lives, the GBI had said 35 people were wounded but the agency did not specify how many of them had been struck by bullets.

Of the 10 surviving victims who were not shot, some were hit by cars that were fleeing the scene, others were trampled and one ran into a tree limb, the law enforcement official told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday.

The two young men who were killed, as well as the other 25 people injured, all suffered gunshot wounds, according to the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

As of midday Wednesday, no arrests had been made and investigators have so far divulged no motive for the bloodshed.

The shooting, amid a crowd estimated at upward of 1,000 people, happened shortly before 2 a.m. Sunday on a residential street a few blocks west of U.S. 41 in Middle Georgia.

Many of the revelers flocked to the word-of-mouth and social-media-promoted gathering from surrounding counties to the rural town of roughly 3,000 residents.

When the shooting began, scores of people scrambled for cover and in the minutes later, after the shots subsided, another burst of gunfire split the night from an adjacent street.

On Tuesday, Dooly County Sheriff Craig Peavy, asked if he could better describe what prompted the gunfire or the circumstances surrounding it, said there were at least a handful of potential scenarios. He declined to elaborate, but said, “We’re getting all different kinds of stories.”

“Nothing indicates that one person came in here to hurt that many people,” Peavy told the AJC.

The sheriff said he senses there were multiple shooters but emphasized that it was too early for certainty.

“We’re at the fork in the road to see what’s going to take us in which direction,” Peavy said.

Investigators with search dogs combed overgrown vacant lots Tuesday on the northwestern edge of town where the shooting happened, trying to find weapons, ammunition or other potential evidence that may have been tossed.

Peavy himself was back at the scene along West Pine Street with GBI agents.

He spoke to a reporter and suggested that rainy weather early Saturday night had, at least for a while, kept throngs of people away.

But when the weather cleared, before midnight, revelers poured into the neighborhood that is loosely bounded by a state highway, a rail line and the rusted remnants of a sprawling peanut-processing facility.

“When it stopped raining at 10 or 10:30 (p.m.),” Peavy said, snapping his fingers, “it was just like somebody opened the gate and here (the people) come from everywhere.”

Instead of people drifting in throughout the night, Peavy said, “everybody comes at once.”