WARM SPRINGS, Ga. — Throughout the day, locals and law enforcement officers stopped outside the Warm Springs Police Department to place bouquets of flowers and balloons in honor of the small-town officer killed on the job.
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“I just wanted to honor the police officer who passed away,” Melanie Walker told Channel 2’s Bryan Mims. She works at a local hospital and said she would regularly see the officer.
Authorities said the officer had just arrested the accused shooter on Friday morning.
Chris Fisher, a husband and father of two children, had joined the Warm Springs Police Department in May and was promoted to sergeant in July.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Fisher had just completed a traffic stop late Tuesday night and was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Meriwether Country Inn on Spring Street.
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That’s when a 2026 Chevrolet Silverado pulled up and the driver opened fire on Fisher, who was pronounced dead on the scene.
The driver, identified by the GBI as 23-year-old Jimmy Lee Steverson of Warm Springs, drove off and prompted a massive manhunt.
Shortly before noon Wednesday, deputies in Anderson County, South Carolina, stopped a car along Interstate 85 with Steverson inside. The GBI said as deputies approached the car, they found Steverson injured from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He died in the hospital.
Court records show Fisher had just arrested the accused shooter early Friday morning, charging Steverson with marijuana possession and firearms charges, but the suspect was released on bond.
“He was always jovial, he was always cutting jokes,” Walker said of the fallen officer. “When he came in, he was always doing his job and I was always doing mine. But he was always very friendly; that’s what I remember most.”
At Mac’s Barbecue, a favorite hangout in Warm Springs, employees Ada Lee and Fallon Hart saw officer Fisher nearly every day. The restaurant is just yards away from where the shooting happened.
“He was a really nice guy,” Lee said. “He always came into the barbecue and checked on us and made sure everything was good with us. I don’t think there was a day we didn’t see him.”
She said he had just come to the restaurant Tuesday, hours before his death. In a town of about 450 people, with fewer than 10 police officers, she said the loss is shattering.
“It’s tragic, it’s tragic, especially to somebody who is just so kind,” she said.
Hart remembers Fisher for “the loyalty and compassion.”
“I’d see him sit at this stop sign, actually, catching people running the stop sign down the road and he’d come in and we’d joke, ‘don’t give me a ticket,’ and he’d say he’d just want to get some food today,” she said.
Before coming to Warm Springs, Fisher was a deputy with the Meriwether County Sheriff’s Office, the Heard County Sheriff’s Office and Fayette County Sheriff’s Office.
Now, a small town is coming together to comfort his family – and one another.
“We always come together to honor whoever it is and to check on their families,” Walker said.
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