CARTERSVILLE, Ga. — The GBI is investigating after a sheriff’s deputy got into a shootout with an armed man, who ran from a fast-food restaurant.
It started outside a Cartersville McDonald’s and ended at a nearby motel.
Channel 2’s Steve Gehlbach spoke with several witnesses who said they saw a man running with a gun, then fired at a deputy.
The sheriff’s office has not confirmed yet if their deputy was shot.
But witnesses told Gehlbach they think he was hit in the shoulder or vest, and a fellow deputy drove him to the hospital.
Investigators with the GBI collected shell casings and other evidence on Tuesday in the courtyard of the Grassdale Suites.
Bullets were flying in the courtyard of the extended stay motel around 6:45 a.m.
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According to multiple witnesses, a deputy shot an armed suspect and also may have been shot himself.
Gehlbach said he could see what looked like a bullet hole in his driver’s side door.
“The first thing I heard was two firecracker sounds, shots, then the officer yelling ‘let me see your hands.’ And then fired six to seven shots,” one man who lives at the extended stay told Gehlbach, asking not to be identified. “I got down in seconds.”
According to the Bartow County Sheriff’s Office, deputies responded to the nearby McDonald’s on Highway 41 after a man pulled a gun on employees working the drive-thru window.
“What I was told, he was walking the parking lot, aiming his gun at employees at McDonald’s,” witness Michael Carpenter said.
Neighbors saw the suspect down on the ground right outside their rooms. He was taken away by ambulance, but they don’t think he survived the shootout.
“There’s no way that guy lived. There’s no way,” the extended stay resident said.