Atlanta police shot a man who they say first fired at them after being escorted out of a downtown Greyhound bus station, according to officials.
Officers were called to the Forsyth Street station around 4:30 a.m. Sunday on reports of an unruly man, later identified as 30-year-old Tobias Levontae Sutton of College Park, who was refusing to leave the property, according to the GBI, which is investigating the incident. It’s the same bus station where two other police shootings have happened in recent years.
Sutton, who was not a passenger, was escorted out of the building by security but would not leave the premises, police said in a statement.
Two officers who had been flagged down by security for help were escorting Sutton toward the sidewalk when he pulled a handgun from a suitcase he was pushing and fired at them, according to the GBI. The officers returned fire, striking the suspect.
Sutton was considered stable when he was taken to a hospital, police said. No officers were injured.
“It’s only by the grace of God that we didn’t have a different outcome,” Deputy Chief Charles Hampton Jr. told reporters at the scene.
The GBI will conduct an independent investigation. Once completed, it will turn over its findings to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office for review.
In February 2022, an Atlanta officer shot a woman at the Forsyth Street station who was suspected of stabbing a man and a woman and was still armed with a knife in each hand, authorities said at the time.
In May 2018, an off-duty Georgia State University officer shot a man who tried to attack her at the station, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported. She had been working an extra job as a security guard when the man began acting erratically and harassing patrons before turning his attention to the officer.
Sunday’s incident marks the state’s 32nd officer-involved shooting that the GBI has been asked to investigate this year. By the same time last year, there had been 42 in Georgia.
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