One dead, seven wounded in Fort Valley mass shooting early Saturday morning
A local man was killed and seven people wounded in a shooting at an off-campus homecoming party in Fort Valley early Saturday morning.
Witnesses to the shooting, which occurred after midnight at a large party on Carver Drive, describe a chaotic scene as people fled the gunfire through neighboring yards. Investigators said they’re working to identify what they believe are multiple shooters.
The massive annual party attracted hundreds of people, according to witnesses, and police officers were in the area before the shooting, Peach County Sheriff Terry Deese said.
“There was just a large crowd of people,” he said. “Everything was going fine, somebody started yelling and then gunshots. Of course, then it was chaos.”
What sparked the shooting is unclear, but witnesses said people began running before they heard the shots.
“Initially, we saw people running, and then gunshots,” Michael McGhee, who lives across the street from the scene of the shooting, said. “It was around 1:30 [a.m.] when the gunshots started, and there was probably a good two-to-three minutes of shooting. There were several people shooting, I heard several different types of guns.
“So many people were running... I found five or six shoes in my backyard.”
Peach County Coroner Kerry Rooks identified the victim as Tyler French, 27, of Byron. French was pronounced dead at 3:03 a.m. in a Macon hospital.
‘I didn’t know where to run’
Saturday afternoon, maybe 12 hours after the gunfire, as the homecoming crowd filtered into town, some milled about in the blocks around the shooting scene.
Carver Drive, which skirts the eastern edge of Fort Valley State University’s campus on the south side of Fort Valley, is a residential street that includes a handful of businesses, an outreach ministry and a barber shop, was still cordoned off to traffic in the blocks around where the party was.
A young woman from Warner Robins was outside Holland’s Barber shop in the shade of some pecan trees. She had been among the late-night homecoming revelers and she and four or five her friends had hit the ground when the shooting began.
“It was chaotic,” said the young woman who declined to give her name, but said she was visiting from Warner Robins. “Hundreds of people running around in the dark.”
“It just popped off,” said another young woman from Atlanta.
The friends described a rush of people “running from everywhere” and then gunfire. The out-of-towners said it was an especially frightening episode because they weren’t familiar with the area.
“I didn’t know where to run for an escape route,” one of the young women said.
A man who lives about 150 yards from the shooting scene described the midnight gunfire as something “like a war zone.”
“I just heard a lot of gunshots, a lot of people running and screaming,” said the man who watched the mayhem from his porch and who declined to give his name. “It was scary. I got a 3-year-old daughter.”
‘Definitely more than one’
The GBI is investigating the incident, and Deese said law enforcement is looking for more than one person.
“We’re pretty sure there were multiple shooters,” he said. “Definitely more than one.”
Deese said he believed there were some three dozen or more witnesses that the investigators had to talk to, adding that bystanders and people at the scene had been “very cooperative.”
“Hopefully, they’ll be able to narrow it down,” he said.
Deese said that some of the shooting victims were driven to hospitals in Peach and Bibb counties before ambulances arrived on the scene.
“We feel confident that GBI investigators will be able to get this sorted out,” he said.
Fort Valley State University confirmed French was not an FVSU student. The university canceled its Saturday morning homecoming parade and alumni breakfast.
A football game Saturday afternoon between FVSU and Clark Atlanta University was still scheduled, but with increased security, a university spokesperson said.
This story was originally published October 23, 2021 at 8:57 AM.