Police officers shot and wounded a man early Friday when he allegedly rammed a stolen pickup truck into a patrol car at the end of a short chase through southeast Atlanta.
Atlanta police Capt. Michael O’Connor said the pursuit of the truck, which was reported stolen in a Forest Park carjacking, began around 4 a.m. on Lakewood Avenue and ended about two minutes later on Jonesboro Road.
“At the end of the vehicle pursuit, the suspect’s truck overshot the intersection and ran into a building,” O’Connor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “At the building, there is a meter for a gas line. He ran into that.”
O’Connor said the suspect, identified by Channel 2 Action News as 40-year-old Jackie Harris, put the truck in reverse, ramming a patrol car.
The suspect then put the truck back into drive, hitting the building and gas meter again before backing into the patrol car a second time, this time ending up on top of the hood of the cruiser.
“At that time, there were a number of officers in the street,” O’Connor said. “He could have struck several of those officers. They then fired their weapons to stop what they viewed as the threat of the truck that was coming at them.”
O’Connor did not know how many shots were fired.
Despite being hit at least once, O’Connor said the suspect was “alert and conscious at the time [he] was taken away and was talking.”
He said the suspect was in stable condition in surgery just before daybreak.
A woman who was in the truck was not injured during the incident.
Harris faces multiple traffic charges, and was wanted on a probation violation, Channel 2 reported.
The truck’s owner, Dana Thomas, told the station that his truck was stolen while he worked on July 28.
Asked if the suspect in Friday’s incident was armed, O’Connor said, “He had a weapon – a 3,000-pound pickup truck.”
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