A quiet neighborhood in the Stone Mountain area was upended Monday morning when a driver was shot multiple times and violently crashed, first into another vehicle and then into the corner of a house.
The incident, which rattled the Carriage Trace subdivision off Stephenson Road around 8 a.m., left the driver in serious condition and caused the two vehicles to become wedged between two homes on Ashley Lane. Witnesses said children were with the victim at the time of the shooting.
Police said a suspect, who was not publicly identified, fired multiple shots at a passing vehicle and struck its driver. The victim was taken to a hospital, and no other injuries were reported. The home is structurally sound, police said, despite crumbling bricks and exposed insulation.
Credit: John Spink / John.Spink@ajc.com
Credit: John Spink / John.Spink@ajc.com
At least one of the crashed vehicles, a gray GMC Yukon, was riddled with bullets and its airbags fully deployed, and a witness said the gunshot victim showed up at her door.
Annittra Rutledge said she was still in bed when she heard the gunfire and subsequent crash. Then, she heard a beating at the door and looked at her security cameras.
“The guy that got shot, I saw two of his sons at my door, but I didn’t see him until I looked further over … and he was just kind of leaning on my car,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
At another nearby house, a woman who asked not to be identified said her daughter was just getting home from work when they heard the gunshots and a “big boom.”
“I looked out my bedroom window, and I literally saw people running down the street, shooting guns like a movie. ‘Pow! Pow!’” she recounted. “I, being gullible, thought, ‘Oh, it’s the police!’”
“It was literally like I was in an action-packed movie,” she added.
The woman closed the blinds and told everyone in the house to get on the floor. Then, the shooting stopped.
“I looked back out the window and saw that my daughter’s car was gone,” she said.
Her daughter’s immediate thought was that someone stole her car, but when they went outside, they noticed the victim’s SUV “had taken out two mailboxes and taken my daughter’s car, up through our yard to the left of our house, into our neighbor’s house.”
She said the car was totaled, which has left her daughter distraught because it was a gift from her grandfather. She soon discovered the loud boom they heard was the car crashing into her house.
“You can literally stand inside that bedroom and see outside, and you can see the car — the SUV from that bedroom,” she said.
Just moments earlier, back at Rutledge’s house, she and her husband had opened the door to let the victim inside, “but it wasn’t that easy to get him in the house,” she said. He had multiple gunshot wounds and was in pain.
She and her husband then began trying to administer first aid as they both called 911 but were on hold for several minutes, she said.
“It kept saying, ‘Don’t hang up, don’t hang up’ or ‘if you hang up, it’s gonna delay your call,” she said.
Help arrived within 10 minutes after the call was finally answered.
“As he was sitting at the kitchen table he was kinda fading away,” Rutledge said, “but we kept trying to get him together. I gave him some water.”
As for her neighbor, the woman said there are “some real serious decisions to make.”
“This is a quiet neighborhood. We’re like a family, so that’s why everybody is out today, you know, supporting each other,” she said. “We do family things, we have events. And so, this is really shaking us up.”
