A Cobb County SWAT officer who shot and killed a standoff suspect Friday took the life of another hostage-taker just 15 months earlier, a Georgia Bureau of Investigations spokeswoman confirmed Monday.
Friday's killing of Brian Easley, the 33-year-old military veteran who held Marietta bank workers hostage while falsely claiming he had an IED, was the most recent occasion officer Dennis Ponte has made the decision to the pull the trigger.
In April 2016, Ponte shot and killed an 18-year-old Demetrius Deshon Dorsey, who was holding at gunpoint two employees of a Marathon gas station in Mableton.
During the Washington Post’s national investigation of officer-involved shootings, it looked at cops involved in subsequent shootings.
The newspaper found that in the 367 cases it was able to get data for, one in eight such officer-involved shootings between January and September 2015 involved at least one officer who had taken part in a previous deadly shooting.
The GBI investigated the 2016 case and is looking into Friday’s fatal shooting.
Easley's death is the 41st officer-involved shooting in Georgia so far in 2017, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Read more about both shootings and Easley’s mental state on myAJC.com.
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