A man aiming a long gun at law enforcement was fatally shot by a Bartow County SWAT officer Sunday afternoon during a standoff at a home near Adairsville, officials said.
The sheriff’s office was called around 4 p.m. to the residence on Wesley Mill Drive after Chris Cochran, 60, threatened his wife and a crisis intervention team that had gone there to help, the GBI said.
After Cochran started making threats, officials said his wife and the crisis team took shelter at a neighbor’s house across the street. Bartow deputies then responded, the GBI said.
With deputies in the area, Cochran ran back inside his home, where he was “known to have a large number of rifles,” according to the GBI. A SWAT team was called to the scene after Cochran smashed several windows of his house and continued to make threats, officials said.
As the SWAT team worked to remove Cochran’s wife, deputies, and witnesses from the area, officials said Cochran pointed a long gun out of a second-story window. He then threatened law enforcement and the witnesses outside, leading a SWAT officer to shoot him, the GBI stated.
“My grandmother said she could hear the cops say get down, get down,” a neighbor, Jada McCollum, told Channel 2 Action News. “They wouldn’t let her out of the house. They had to cover the blinds and hide.”
Cochran was pronounced dead at the scene by the Bartow County Coroner’s Office, and his body will be taken to the GBI Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy, the state agency said. No deputies were injured during the incident.
The GBI was asked to conduct an independent investigation. Once completed, the case will be given to the Cherokee Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office for review. It was 55th second officer-involved shooting the state agency had been asked to investigate in 2024, and the eighth since Aug. 10. At the same time last year, there had been investigations into 64 such shootings.
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