A man suspected of shooting three people at a South Georgia home was taken into custody Wednesday after he fired at law enforcement officers and they returned fire, officials said.
The three victims and the suspect were said to be stable after being shot Wednesday night in Claxton, a small Evans County town about 60 miles west of Savannah. The GBI is investigating the incident as an officer-involved shooting at the request of the Evans County Sheriff’s Office.
The state agency was contacted about 8 p.m. Wednesday, officials said.
Within an hour, it was asked to investigate another fatal police shooting in Bibb County. That came several hours after an officer-involved shooting in Perry, where a man was killed. The three shootings Wednesday bring the total number of officer-involved shootings in Georgia this year to 19, according to the GBI.
In Evans, sheriff’s deputies responded to a home on Ruffins Road around 7:30 p.m. after receiving a call about a shooting. When they arrived, they found one man suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, the GBI said in a news release.
Backup arrived and began searching for the suspect, officials said. As they searched, another man and a woman pulled up to the house to check on family members who may have been involved in the shooting, a GBI spokesperson said in the release.
“The shooting suspect, identified as Paul Alexander Eason, age 41, of Claxton, began shooting into the man and woman’s car,” the spokesperson said. “Law enforcement officers from the Evans County Sheriff’s Office and Claxton Police Department shot Eason after he fired at an officer and shot the man and woman.”
The motive behind the initial shooting was not disclosed. It was not clear how Eason was connected to the three shooting victims.
In Bibb County, a man parked in an emergency lane of I-75 in Macon opened fire on Georgia State Patrol troopers and local deputies who approached his car, according to the GBI. When the man got out and aimed at the officers, they returned fire and fatally shot the man, according to GBI officials. The man’s name has not been released pending next of kin notification.
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.
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