‘Everybody’s packing’: After mass shooting, Georgia town hunts for answers

VIENNA — On a misty, overcast Monday morning less than half a mile down West Pine Street from where two people were killed and 35 more were wounded early Sunday in a hail of gunfire and the pandemonium to escape it, someone’s mobile home caught fire.

No one was hurt in the blaze but the smell of the charred residence hung in the air. Neighbors and passersby gathered and stared as if to wonder: What next?

Up the block, a woman driving by on the way to cook breakfast for her son slow-rolled past the Vienna Temple of Faith Church. There at the corner of Spruce Lane in a neighborhood of mostly mobile homes, two women were talking. Barely 24 hours had passed and the chaos of Sunday morning and its aftermath had yet to sink in.

The woman cruising by, hearing word of the house fire, shook her head and asked how much more heartbreak and hardship this town, this very street, could take. She said people from all over were calling her in disbelief and wanting to know if the predawn shootings the day before had actually happened.

“Yeah,” she told the folks, “it’s really true.”

One of the other women chimed in: “We ain’t used to this.”

“Not at all,” said a third woman, whose name is Lisa Bryant, a retired educator, who had pulled her 2003 Lincoln Navigator into the church parking lot to chat. “But it is true, baby. Happened about 50 yards from my house. But we’re gonna be all right. … There’s still a small-town feel that comforts us.”

The weekend gathering itself, in rural Georgia, for a time at least, had that kind of down-home atmosphere, those familiar with it have said. There was grilling. Music pumped. Revelers from surrounding counties and beyond, some from as far as Atlanta, showed up for a gathering publicized on social media.

The block party, loosely centered on Dooly County High School’s homecoming weekend, though not tied to the school, is not unlike others that crop up in communities across the state. Partiers from places where there isn’t always a whole lot hopping will congregate to make their own fun in similar out-of-the-way locales.

The GBI, which is leading the investigation into the shootings, offered little in the way of updates Monday. No arrests had been made and it remained unclear what prompted the gunfire or if the authorities even know.

“Leads are coming in and we’re following the leads,” said Jerry Jones, the GBI special agent in charge of that agency’s Perry field office, which is overseeing the probe. “The case is moving forward at a good pace. Good information has come in, but as far as identifying (suspects) or making arrests, no.”

Few signs of the episode were noticeable Monday in the blocks of West Pine and the thoroughfares around it. Black plastic bags of trash, debris from the party, were piled in spots along the road as were a couple of crumpled tents tossed by a garbage can. Gone were most of the curious sightseers who’d ventured through Sunday and also absent were some of the partygoers themselves who had returned the day before looking for belongings they’d dropped in the mayhem. A girl from Houston County lost her keys and couldn’t find them in the ditch where she fled. A young man searching the littered streetscape found a watch that wasn’t his.

This Middle Georgia town of not quite 3,000 people was named for the Austrian capital, but is pronounced “Vie-inn-uh,” its first syllable rhyming with “pie.” It is known for the Big Pig Jig, the state’s oldest official barbecue-cooking contest, and a surrounding countryside blanketed in cotton this time of year. It has known hard times. A 1999 tornado left hundreds without shelter. A gang-linked shooting on East Pine Street eight year ago left one person dead at a nightclub.

Vienna’s one-red-light downtown, invisible to passersthrough on I-75 less than 2 miles to the east, was also the birthplace of former Georgia Gov. George Busbee. Legendary U.S. Sen. Walter F. George lived here and is buried here. Portraits of both men hang on a wall above the jury box at the Dooly County Courthouse.

Sheriff Craig Peavy, whose father Van was sheriff from 1985 until his death at age 78 in 2015, said in the hours after the shootings on Sunday that people digesting news of the bloodshed here should rethink the notion that bad things don’t much happen in small places.

“Don’t think it can’t happen in your hometown,” Peavy said, standing mere paces from where the gunfire started.

Despite not knowing what triggered the gunfire, locals are trying to make sense of the outburst and fill in the blanks of the unknown as best they can.

Bryant, 62, a former teacher and West Pine Street resident who lives just down from where the shooting happened, said “the commotion” erupted while she was watching a movie on TV shortly before 2 a.m. Sunday. She thought the pop-pop-pops were firecrackers, but she soon sought cover on the floor.

Peeking out her window, she spotted a number of young people scattering from a block party centered near her yard, where for hours there had been a deejay and possibly more than 1,000 people on hand.

When the gunfire subsided, Bryant said her husband told her, “Somebody’s been hurt. Somebody’s been shot with that many people and that many shots.”

Bryant later saw one of the wounded, a young woman who’d been grazed, at a neighbor’s house. Bryant believes there were multiple shooters, though she said that was just what she had been told.

She thinks shots may have been fired and answered with retaliatory gunfire by whomever was being shot at.

“It makes sense,” she said. “Everybody’s packing. Young kids got guns. … ‘And if I’ve got one and you’re shooting at me, I’m gonna try to get you before you get me.’ That’s human nature.”

During the lunch hour Monday on Vienna’s town square, Michael Ramsey stopped by Cafe 41, a coffee and sandwich shop that faces the courthouse. He said people were still waiting on “the facts to come out” and that they were hoping the troublemakers were from out of town.

Ramsey, who is 55 and lives nearby, couldn’t believe how widespread the news of the killings and shootings was. An old friend from college at the University of Central Florida messaged him from Norway: “Are you guys OK?”

Earlier in the day, a few doors down the block toward Union Street at the Medicine Stop I pharmacy, at least one family member of a shooting victim who was wounded in the hand stopped by to fill a prescription for the victim.

Pharmacy technician Michelle Priest, 53, who lives in neighboring Cordele where one of the young men who was killed resided, said another patron’s cousin had been shot in the back while sitting on her own porch.

“I think it’s gang-related,” Priest said of the episode.

An acquaintance of hers had a cousin who was shot in the neck. The bullet exited his face. “He lost a lot of teeth and he’s got to have facial surgery,” Priest said.