Accused Athens cop killer Jamie Hood was agitated and high on cocaine when he called police with his demands for his surrender, said Georgia's top cop Tuesday.
Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said the GBI got a call from Hood around 3:40 Friday afternoon.
“He called in and said ‘I’m Jamie Hood and I want to talk to the GBI [agent] in charge,’” Keenan said.
Case agent Trent Hillsman got on the line and Hood “started screaming into the phone ‘I know y’all are trying to kill me -- I want to surrender. I want to be safe. I have hostages and plenty of firearms,’” Keenan said.
Off and on for 30 minutes Hillsman and Hood talked. Hood would call “ and hang up and say ‘I’m not talking to you anymore.’ ‘I’ll call you back in 10 minutes,’” Keenan said.
“He was very agitated, screaming and hollering, and then he would become lucid,” Keenan told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Tuesday.
Eventually one of the hostages got on the phone and gave the address, Creekstone Duplexes north of downtown Athens was where the man wanted on charges he killed a cop had been all day.
About 25 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies had been looking for the 33-year-old man since Tuesday when Athens-Clarke County Police Officer Elmer "Buddy" Christian was shot and killed and another policeman, Tony Howard, was wounded.
Their efforts to find him were unusual.
Athens PD had put out an appeal that Hood surrender on the agency’s Facebook page, assuring him that he would not be harmed. Others had gone to Hood’s Facebook site to make similar pleas. His mother and father were on television begging their son to give up.
Keenan made televised appeals to Hood, promising he would not be harmed if he peacefully surrendered.
Hood had been watching television news accounts of the search for him. He also was hiding in the woods, watching police officers and it was from that vantage point that he saw an opportunity; a 13-year-old girl came out to turn on the car so it could warm up for a drive to school Friday morning.
Keenan said Hood grabbed the girl and ran inside, holding as many as 10 people hostage, the youngest an infant.
"He started out demanding that his mother, the top GBI person [Keenan] and a lawyer come to him. He wanted to be assured he could surrender and not be harmed," Keenan said. "We weren't sending any persons to have a face-to-face meeting with him into the house. That would only add to the hostage count and then .. we would have a problem."
One of the hostages escaped before police arrived at the duplex, leaving six adults and three children inside.
“We thought there were eight [hostages] but there were nine. That’s part of the unpredictability. We didn’t know the exact number of hostages,” Keenan said.
Hood made multiple demands through the afternoon and into the early evening when a primary FBI negotiator, backed up by a team and using information from a UGA football player who had reached out to Hood, took over the calls.
His focus was on his own safety, Keenan said.
"The FBI was crucial in this,” Keenan said. “They’ve got top-of-the-line hostage negotiators and they showed their stuff here.”
FBI spokesman Steve Emmett said the team was Atlanta-based but declined to name the members, stressing that they work as a team though usually only one of them had direct contact with Hood.
“The rapport building between the negotiator and the suspect is crucial in these matters,” Emmett said.
The negotiating team persuaded Hood to let the baby, a 3-year-old and two adults go around 9 p.m.
Hood wanted it all on live television.
“I was very apprehensive about doing a surrender on live television,” Keenan said. “When I don’t know for certain what’s going to transpire, it is risky business,” Keenan said.
The decision was a joint one made by the GBI, the FBI and Athens-Clarke County police Chief Joseph Lumpkin.
“I don’t know that we would ever do this again except in the circumstance we were faced with here,” Keenan said. “This was the course of action to go with. Anything else was going to result in violence.”
On live television at 11:17 p.m. Hood walked out. He and the other men leaving were shirtless, a requirement by law enforcement officers wanting assurances they were not armed.
Hood was in the middle of the line with a woman and child behind him.
“That was a calculated move on his part to send the adults out first,” Keenan said. “He put himself in the middle with the women and a 13-year-old child behind him so he could have control of the situation and could get back inside the house with them.”
Keenan said Hood was still agitated as he was cuffed and led to a patrol car. He could not tell if Hood was still under the influence of drugs.
Just before getting into the car, the GBI director heard Hood say “’I’m sorry I killed that officer. He didn’t deserve that.’
“He made a self-serving comment,” Keenan said when asked if that was a confession. “The court will determine if it it was incriminating or a confession. My position is he made a self-serving comment.”
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