A man was in critical condition after a police officer who saw him wielding a metal pipe shot him in Midtown early Sunday morning, authorities said.
The incident began with a report of a man armed with a metal pipe near the intersection of Peachtree Place and Juniper Street, deputy police Chief Charles Hampton told reporters at the scene. A witness flagged down an officer about 5:45 a.m. and said the man had been hitting cars and had struck another person with the pipe, he said.
Authorities said it is not clear what prompted the man to start swinging the pipe.
The police officer got out of his patrol car and “had an encounter” with the man, officials said. The details of the encounter are not clear, but Hampton said it led to the officer deploying his Taser and then firing his service weapon multiple times.
The man was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital in critical condition and is in surgery.
The person who was hit with the pipe sustained an injury to the arm and was taken to Grady for treatment, Hampton said. The officer was not injured, he said.
Officials said the officer’s body-worn camera was on at the time of the incident and surveillance cameras in the area may have captured the moments leading up to the shooting.
“We will be obtaining those videos to see if they captured any of the incident,” Hampton said.
Atlanta police asked the GBI to investigate the shooting, which would be the 66th shooting involving a police officer the agency has been requested to investigate this year. It was one of two such shootings that happened on Sunday, according to Channel 2 Action News.
The GBI was called to investigate a shooting involving a Georgia State Patrol trooper near Georgia Tech’s campus on Sunday afternoon, the news station reported. Few details were released about the incident, but authorities said it happened near 10th and State streets.
Students living at the nearby Home Park area were asked to stay inside while investigators were at the scene.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also tracks officer-involved shootings that don’t involve the GBI, and those numbers sometimes differ from the GBI’s tally.
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