Deadly Savannah incident is GBI’s 11th police shooting this year

Shots were fired about 9:20 p.m. Thursday when Savannah police officers responded to a residential street near the city’s Midtown.

Credit: WSAV-TV

Credit: WSAV-TV

Shots were fired about 9:20 p.m. Thursday when Savannah police officers responded to a residential street near the city’s Midtown.

The GBI on Thursday night was called to the scene of another officer-involved shooting, the fourth police shooting in the state this week.

Shots were fired about 9:20 p.m. when Savannah police officers responded to a home invasion near the city’s Midtown, according to the GBI. They encountered the suspect, identified as 22-year-old Deandre Lee Seaborough-Patterson, standing in the yard of the home.

“The officers gave clear instructions for Patterson to drop the weapon,” GBI special agent in charge Lindsay Smith said in a news release. “He did not comply with verbal commands.”

The officers fired after Patterson pointed his weapon toward them, Smith said. They tried to perform CPR, but Patterson died at a hospital.

No officers were injured. A handgun was recovered from the scene, according to the GBI.

The shooting is the 11th the agency has investigated in the first three weeks of 2020. Just this week, law enforcement agencies in LaGrangeMadison County and Atlanta have requested the help of state agents to investigate their own officer-involved incidents.

The week before that took agents to Lenox Square in Buckhead, a gas station in Milledgeville, an apartment in Hahira, a Wendy's in Lawrenceville and a home outside Powder Springs.

At this point last year, the GBI had investigated seven officer-involved shootings. A total of 84 incidents were investigated by the agency in 2019, of which 37 were fatal.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also tracks officer-involved shootings that don't involve the GBI, and those numbers sometimes differ from the GBI's tally.

Two other incidents involving police resulted in deaths in 2019, according to the AJC’s figures.

The two latest shootings were hours apart. Just before noon Thursday, a man driving a stolen car was shot and killed by a Georgia State Patrol trooper after a brief pursuit in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood, according authorities.

RELATED: Suspect dies after being shot by state trooper in Edgewood, GSP says

The trooper fired when the man attempted to drive the vehicle toward officers, the GSP said. He died at Grady Memorial Hospital after crashing near the intersection of Leslie and Wylie streets.

No officers were injured in that incident.

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