Man wounded in ‘gunfire exchange’ with Bibb deputy has run from cops, shot man before
A Macon man who fled police and then opened fire on them late Thursday was shot and wounded by a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy at the end of a brief car chase through the Pleasant Hill community, officials said.
The man, later identified as Carlton Lewis Alexander Jr., 35, suffered what sheriff’s officials described as “non-life-threatening” wounds from being shot in the leg as “gunfire was exchanged.”
The deputy, Travis Carlisle, a seven-year veteran, was not injured.
The episode began at 10:45 p.m. just off Vineville Avenue around Ward and Amos streets after deputies answered a “shots fired” call.
It was just north of that area along Walnut Street that an automobile was seen “traveling at a high rate of speed,” the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a statement sent to news outlets.
”The deputy initiated his emergency lights and attempted a traffic stop but the driver failed to stop,” the GBI statement added. “A pursuit ensued and the vehicle drove up on a curb and ultimately came to a stop in the middle of Riverside Drive” not far from College Street at the western edge of downtown.
It was there that Alexander got out of the car and “began shooting at the deputy, striking the deputy’s vehicle four times on the driver’s side,” the GBI statement said. “The deputy returned fire, striking Alexander in the leg.”
Alexander has since been treated at a city hospital and booked into the Bibb jail on charges that include aggravated assault, eluding police and alleged gun-possession crimes.
As is routine in shootings involving law enforcement officers, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was called in to oversee the case.
Alexander, according to court records, has run afoul of the law on multiple occasions.
Since 2012, he has been in and out of state prison three times.
He was most recently released in late 2018 after doing time for a DUI incident in May 2015 in which he fled police in a Honda Accord, breaking a man’s hip in the process, an indictment in that matter said.
He later pleaded guilty, as he did in the wake of an April 2006 shooting at the Fish House on Houston Avenue, which seriously injured a Warner Robins man.
This story was originally published April 30, 2021 at 8:36 AM.