Chris Ervin started his Monday morning thankful to be alive.
“I’m having a wonderful morning just sitting here with a big smile on my face,” Ervin wrote in a Facebook post, “thanking God for everything he has helped me ... through.”
Nearly 10 hours after he posted how lucky he was to be alive, Ervin was shot and killed in a road-rage incident on I-285 in DeKalb County.
After a minor crash, authorities said Ervin got out of his car and approached Johnnie Hudson, who fired at Ervin through his driver’s side window. It is not clear if any words were exchanged between the men before the fatal shot.
Witness Frank Kovagh pulled his car over and approached the alleged gunman.
Hudson, the 39-year-old Decatur man currently in the county jail on a murder charge, asked Kovagh to call 911.
“I just shot him,” Hudson told Kovagh.
The lifeless body of Ervin, 33, of Stone Mountain, was next to the left front tire of Hudson’s tan Dodge pickup truck.
“Did he have a gun?” Kovagh asked.
“No,” Hudson said.
Those were some of the new details that emerged Tuesday in a DeKalb police report that detailed the aftermath of the shooting.
Hudson was already in a patrol car when additional officers got to the scene on I-285 South near the Ponce de Leon Avenue exit, police said. They saw Ervin’s body and shattered glass on the roadway. The driver’s side window on Hudson’s truck was broken. There was a .40-caliber shell casing mixed in with the broken glass.
It appeared Hudson’s truck had rear-ended Ervin’s Lexus, according to the report. The driver’s door on the Lexus was open.
As an officer transferred Hudson from one patrol car to another, Hudson had a question, police said.
He wanted to know if Ervin was alive. The report does not say if the officer answered him.
Ervin’s family continues to grapple with the sudden loss of their loved one, calling Hudson a “coward” for shooting someone who simply approached his car.
“It doesn’t make sense to kill someone like that,” Ervin’s father, Chris Ervin, told Channel 2 Action News. “That’s senseless, that’s murder. That’s cold-blooded murder.”
— Staff writer Ellen Eldridge contributed to this article.
