A man and a woman were in the Tift County jail Friday after a confrontation with a Georgia State Patrol Trooper.
The trooper had pulled the couple over for speeding northbound on Interstate 75 outside Tifton, said GBI Agent J.T. Ricketson, special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Perry office.
Ricketson said the trooper checked the woman drivers’ license and found it was suspended. When he was arresting her, he became involved in a confrontation with the man and fired a shot.
The man was slightly wounded and was released back to law enforcement after being treated at the hospital, Ricketson said.
“The guy was struck but at this point we are not sure if he was struck with the bullet or with shrapnel because the bullet struck something else first,” Ricketson said.
The GBI has not released the name of the trooper or the man and woman who were arrested.
Citing the ongoing investigation, Ricketson declined to go into detail about the confrontation and shooting but said that both the trooper’s audio microphone and the patrol car’s dashboard camera recorded the event.
GBI agents expect to charge the man with aggravated assault, he said.
It all happened about 11 a.m. at mile marker 71, about 170 miles south of Atlanta, which created havoc with Memorial Day weekend traffic, Ricketson said. The GBI brought in three crime-scene specialists, which forced them to shut down the entire northbound interstate for a few minutes before opening one lane.
“In five or ten minutes the traffic backed up about seven miles,” he said.
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